Hey, writers, wouldn’t you just love to blow off all those enticing internet distractions when you’ve got a daily writing quota to turn out?
How many times, with the best of intentions, have you told yourself, “I’m going to stay off the internet until after lunch,” yet somehow it doesn’t happen. The end of the day rolls around and you haven’t written a word.
NaNoWriMo, the yearly gut check for novelists, is coming, and that means over 1,500 words a day for 30 days. Are you up to it? Sure, you say, but here comes another email, another tweet. Plus, there’s some important research to get done, and you haven’t changed your Facebook status in a while, and…oh, what the heck, why not surf through a few blogs while you’re at it.
And on and on it goes. What price freedom?
How about $29? That’s how much it costs to buy Freedom for a year. Back in the day, the price was $35 for the utility, and you owned it. Nowadays, subscriptions are the vogue, but you can buy a “forever” subscription for $129. Once you’re through the (rather unweildy) sign-up process, just a couple of clicks and your internet is turned off for whatever length of time you specify.
Do you work on a web-based platform? No problem. Freedom allows you to exempt any site you need as an “exception.”
Sure, you can turn it back on. But to do it, you have to shut down your computer, and sit there feeling like dog food while it reboots. In my experience, that’s sufficient trouble (not to mention self-loathing) that you’ll think twice before surfing away.
Freedom comes in both Mac and PC versions, and in my opinion it takes its place beside Dr. Wicked’s Write or Die in the Self Enforcement Wing of the Writers’ Hall of Fame for Internet Tools. (For the record, I have no affiliate relationship with either Freedom or Write or Die.)
