Tech battles tech

When you first realize that screens are beginning to rule your life, your instinct is to simply switch them off. Put your phone in a drawer and lock it, pull out your Internet cable, buy a typewriter—anything to get you off Facebook long enough to actually get a day’s work done.

The problem is that technology also makes you more efficient. If you need to look something up, it makes no sense to deny yourself the option of simply googling it just because you are afraid that opening your browser will begin a spiral of activities that ends with you watching a reality show on YouTube while chatting with seven people on Gtalk.

The tech world is realizing that the answer to technology’s ill-effects lies in technology itself. So, in the past two years, several companies have launched apps and tools that help you monitor and control your Internet and phone usage, letting you use the Web to enhance your work while staying focused on the task at hand.

Forest (iOS/Android)

This app takes advantage of our insatiable appetite for reward, turning concentration into a game. When you want to concentrate on a task, you open this app on your phone and plant a tree. So long as you don’t open any other app on your phone, the tree continues to grow for 30 minutes. Then another one begins growing. You can set a clock for anywhere between 15-120 minutes at a time, and as you complete more and more distraction-free half-hour segments, you build a forest.

We are good at fooling ourselves, telling ourselves that we have been focused on a task when we haven’t. Once you begin using Forest, all those dead trees, killed because you just had to check that Whatsapp message, act as a reality check. Also, once you’ve used the app for a while, you find yourself engaged in the challenge of growing your forest. If you’re just 5 minutes away from a new tree reaching its full height and you are itching to check Instagram, you’re likely to push yourself to stay away from your phone for those 5 minutes.

Putting your phone away can cause anxiety. We end up worrying about whether we will miss an extremely important call or message. Forest is a great way of having your phone near you but not letting it become a distraction.

Offtime (iOS/Android)

This is an app that locks other apps. Offtime has incredible attention to detail (probably because it’s made by Germans) and offers stats on how many hours you have used your phone and which particular apps you are ensnared in. It can be a frightening experience to look at just how much time you actually spend on apps you insist are completely under-control guilty pleasures. Once you have figured out just how much of your life you spend on your phone, you can use Offtime to restrict access to apps, calls and messages for a time period you can set. Switching it off requires holding a button pressed for an entire minute, and we can promise you that will be a minute of shame you don’t want to endure. What’s great is that you can add some apps to a “Whitelist", which you will be able to access even when Offtime is on. So, say you are reading, you can have your dictionary app accessible while everything else is disabled.

StayFocusd (Chrome)

Even if you can stay away from your phone, the laptop you are working on is in itself a snake pit of distractions. StayFocusd is an extension for the Chrome browser that can lock various features on your desktop. You can block access to any or all websites (and specific subdomains as well) for a set time period, so that you use the Internet only for work. Sure, there are loopholes, like having another browser, but as you will find, once you begin to use productivity tools, knowing that you are cheating makes you too guilty to enjoy whatever it is you are distracting yourself with.

Flipd (iOS, Android)

This is one of the most drastic things you can do if you are truly addicted to your phone. On full lock mode, Flipd makes your phone look like a brand new one—all the downloaded apps disappear for a period of time that you set. During that time, there’s simply no way to regain access to those apps, even if you restart your phone. In fact, every time you try to unlock your phone, Flipd records it and guilt-trips you by showing you how addicted you are. Specifically designed for classroom teachers, it can be activated remotely by someone else. So your teacher, or just someone who you have entrusted with weaning you off your phone addiction, can shut your phone down using theirs.

Productivity Owl (Chrome)

Remember Clippy from MS Word? For your Internet time-wasting habits, there’s a firm but friendly owl that sits on your computer screen and counts down the time you spend on certain pages, dramatically flying in to close the pages after the timer you have set goes off. It also lets you block access to certain pages and lays out a schedule so that you can plan breaks. In case you have links or videos you can’t pass up on, there’s an option to save them for later. The extension also features a hilarious “anti-desperation mode", for anyone who thinks they can refresh pages and work around resetting the timer. Every time you disable this extension from your Chrome browser, your “respect score" with the Owl decreases