Need Self Control? There's an App for That!

 

 A few days ago, I was able to hear CAST co-founder, Dr. David Rose, speak at Towson University. In his speech about Universal Design for Learning, Dr. Rose was talking about developing executive function in the brain and mentioned an App called SelfControl. With so many distractions on the web, many of us feel that we have ADHD while browsing.

This has to be one of the coolest Mac Apps that I have seen. It literally locks you out of distracting websites, so that you can concentrate on doing work for a set amount of time. You literally can block yourself from accessing webmail, social media, or anything else on the Internet.

Once the program starts running, you cannot override it (even if you restart your computer) until the timer stops. This is perfect for when you need 20 solid minutes or 4 hours to work on a project, rather than browse through your news feed. If you do need to use the Internet, you can customize which websites are ok and not ok.

This open source program is free and available to download for Macs. If you have a PC, there is an alternative called Cold Turkey that runs in a similar way. Check out the FAQ's for more information!


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