Maximize your time offline

One of the most effective strategies to be productive and avoid internet distraction is to maximize your time offline. This entails two things.

First, you need to clearly separate your working time into two chunks:

• An offline chunk, in which you produce valuable information (e.g. writing an article) or use information that you have previously gathered to learn something valuable (e.g. studying a second language).

• An internet chunk, which you use to gather information (e.g. an article about how to do something) and/or remotely communicate with other people (e.g. email).

Second, you need to make the internet chunk as short as possible. This would ensure that you maximize your time offline. Furthermore, it would help you to maintain your focus on the important things you need to do online instead of being trapped into internet timewasters.

An additional tip is to leave your internet chunk to the end of your working day (if possible). If you start your working day with an internet chunk, this is surely going to affect negatively your focus. For example, if you read your email first thing in the morning, you are likely going to be thinking about what you read while you aim to produce or learn something meaningful during your offline chunk.

There are two ways to implement this strategy:

1. Working in a place without an internet connection
2. Blocking the internet with a website/app blocker

The strategy “Maximize your time offline” is especially beneficial for people who need to complete a substantial task that requires deep focus. If you are writing a book, you are studying for an exam, you are doing research, etc. you are going to find it tremendously useful for increasing the quality of your work and your productivity.

Work in a place without an internet connection

This is the most extreme version of the strategy of maximizing your time offline. It entails to ideate ways to make it impossible to access the internet at the place where you do deep work.

If you work from home, you can maximize your time offline by cancelling your internet service with the provider. However, many people don’t live alone. In this case, cancelling your internet service doesn’t only depend on you. Instead, you could just delete the Wi-Fi password from your devices. To make this more effective, you can ask the members of your household to change the password and not to tell it to you.

In this way, you would always be in an offline chunk while you are at home. You would need to go to the library, a café, your friend’s house, etc. to use the internet on your internet chunk.

Woman using the internet in a café

Copyright: ammentorp from 123rf

My experience in maximizing my time offline using this method

This might seem too radical. However, this was the way that most people used the internet when the internet started to be a thing. Most people did not have internet at home or on their phones in the early 2000s. They went to the library or a cybercafé to use it. Their use of the internet was quite restricted.

In my case, I used the internet in this way for nearly a decade (1999-2008). I used to surf the web one or two hours a week in the library to gather information to use at home.

More recently, I mimicked this way to use the internet. I lived for four months in a house without an internet connection (or a smartphone) and went to the library or a café to use their internet. In this way, I spent around five hours a week on the internet gathering information and replying to emails. The rest of my working time I was at home writing and conducting data analysis. Maximizing my time offline in this way was extremely useful to finish my Ph.D. thesis on time.

Benefits and limitations

A key benefit of this way of implementing this strategy is that you cannot cheat. That is, if you are at home, you don’t have internet access. Period. So, the only thing you can do in front of the computer is work. You cannot access YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, or your favourite news outlet.

Unfortunately, the coronavirus outbreak led to the closing of cafés and libraries. Consequently, this way of implementing the strategy is practically impossible during a full lockdown.

If you require access to a few websites for your work activity, you can simply not work without an internet connection. In this case, the second strategy in this guide (“whitelist a few websites and block the rest“) would be appropriate.

Another limitation of not having internet at home is that you cannot automatically backup your work on the cloud (e.g. OneDrive, Dropbox). However, the information you produce would be automatically back up when you go to the library or a café to use the internet.

Maximize your time offline blocking the internet with a website blocker

Another way to maximize your time offline is to use an internet blocker such as Freedom.

Using an internet blocker has the following advantages:

• You can maximize your time offline no matter where you are.

• You can block all websites and nonessential applications while Dropbox and OneDrive keep backing up your work.

Learning how to maximize your time offline using the website blocker Freedom is the next section of this guide.

Ángel V. Jiménez