Self-Control is easier if you don't have to think about it
TL;DR, here's the script you're looking for to automate SelfControl on macOS.
For the past few years I've been using the excellent open-source app SelfControl to help with keeping me on task and maybe salvaging a skerrick of my attention span (it's a work-in-progress).
SelfControl blocks distracting websites at a fairly low level on your machine. You can't just swap to a different browser, or edit a configuration block to get to twitter, you've just got to sit there and wait. Amongst other things, SelfControl edits your /etc/hosts file, and does a few other things to prevent you from outsmarting it.
The thing is, in order for SelfControl to work, you do actually have to turn it on. And this is so often where I stumbled–it's both very easy and very tempting to not turn the app on. Around December last year I decided to take that decision (or lack thereof) away from myself by setting an automatic schedule for Self-Control to obey, say, 8am to 4pm on weekdays. I used an open-source Python tool to achieve this, but it broke at some point in the last few months, after an OS update.
I had a look at the Python library's GitHub repo to see if I could fix the issue, but I got lost in the weeds. Instead I decided to automate it with cron.*
The script and some brief instructions are here.
The SelfControl repo provides some instructions on how to run the app from the command line:
The first line sets up the length of the block in minutes (in the example, 2 hours). The second line sets up the sites that will be blocked, so you’ll want to tweak that to your own particular vices.
On line four you run the app as root.
You can save those lines as a bash script (don’t forget to make it executable), and store it in /usr/local/bin.*
The trick to getting this to run on a cron schedule is that you need to do so as root.
To achieve that, crack open sudo crontab -e, put in your password, and then add something along these lines:
That’s going to run at 8am every day, which suits me. If you alter the schedule, use crontab.guru to make sure you’ve got the expression right.
That’s it!
You can probably do something clever to set different schedules for different days, or weekends vs weekdays, and I’ll probably experiment with that over the weekend. In any case, I hope this helps and let me know on twitter if you run into any problems.
* I know cron is deprecated on MacOS but it works for now and I’m too old/cranky/lazy to learn to do it the new way until I’m forced to when this breaks.
* Shout out to my co-worker Adam for helping me figure out where to store it