As someone who is easily distracted by brightly coloured shiny things, which is great when scuba diving in the tropics, but not so great when working on a pretty Retina Display Mac with all sorts of bouncing icons, infinite browser tabs, etc, I use the tools available to remove obstacles in my way. Or indeed, the ones NOT in my way but off to the side of where I want to be going but that are so tantalizing. One such tool is the open source Mac app SelfControl.
The basic functionality of SelfControl is that you set up either a blacklist of sites you don’t want to allow yourself to access for some amount of time or you go hardcore and set up a whitelist of sites that you WILl allow and ban the rest of the world as unacceptable distractions. [Aside: an anti-spam/anti-virus company I used to work for preferred the terms ‘blocklist’ and ‘allowlist’ instead of ‘blacklist’ and ‘whitelist’ for a variety of reasons, some cultural, and where I need to use them, I’ll be using those terms as well.]
With SelfControl, you decide how long you want to focus for, set the slider for that amount of time, and press ‘Start’.
The way it blocks sites is by modifying the Mac’s hosts file (and firewall) so it needs to use admin privileges, which is why you have to enter your password. For many, that’s a decent way of it asking “Are you sure?” because the average user isn’t going to know how to undo the changes manually – that’s part of why it’s effective.
And that’s a perfectly helpful use case: person says “I need to focus for 2 hours straight, and I’m my own worst enemy, so block distractions RIGHT NOW”. But it’s not the one I’m most interested in, personally.
You see, when there’s something that I’m particularly avoiding starting (usually writing), I won’t necessarily even get to the point of starting the app. There are different tiers of self control and what I’d like to do is set myself a regular schedule with blocks at certain times of day. There’s an argument to be made that if I can’t even boot the app & click the button, I have bigger problems to sort out, but if there’s a way to make the process more structured and automatic, I’d prefer that. And I’ve heard from others that they feel the same way – they think scheduling would be useful.
There are a number of things that I’ll need to work through to get that going (not least of which is figuring out how to automate the privilege escalation on a scheduled basis – maybe cron?) but the first hurdle I had was getting the app to build at all.
I had tried to do this about 8 months ago, with NO success. I haven’t been a Mac developer at all and until fairly recently, I hadn’t been a developer for over 10 years. A lot has changed, y’all! And one of the biggest changes has been the burgeoning mass of package managers to simplify installation of apps, libraries, etc. Although I use Homebrew to install apps on my Mac, I hadn’t heard of CocoaPods and didn’t know there was a required step to run ‘pod install’ to get the required prereq libraries installed in the build directory. [It’s useful to run your build instructions past true newbies to find the steps that are SO familiar/basic that it doesn’t occur to you to write them down].
At the Recurse Center, I learned about a lot more package managers, and that there’s at least one for every platform. I already knew about npm & gem, but not pip, and definitely not pod. So I realized that there was a missing step in the SelfControl instructions – one that would be so automatic for Mac app developers that they wouldn’t consider it missing, but for someone who wanted to start their Mac OSS development with SelfControl, it was pretty crucial. Now, I don’t want to suggest that I don’t know how to search for solutions to issues, nor that you don’t. But when you run up against something where you don’t have a reference point for what’s missing, the amount of the unknown is completely unbounded. You have no idea how far away the finish line is, and if your drive to do this is hobbyist-level, you may bail, like I did last summer.
So, armed with this new knowledge, I tried again to build SelfControl from scratch. I got a bunch of failures (including the promised code-signing ones) but some of them are due to a recent Ruby change that apparently breaks CocoaPods. This post is getting long, so here’s a link to how I got through ’em. It’s ALSO long but that’s largely due to a bucketload of screenshots.
