Should you be working right now?

An actor client called me this week with an odd request, could I disable WiFi on his laptop and not tell him how I’d done it? “The web‘s too much of a distraction you see” he said. It’s not often I get asked to stop things working but it’s not the first time. For the same reason ZDNet’s venerable editor Rupert Goodwins at one point resorted to writing on a Mac so old it wouldn’t even run a web browser. I’ve heard of others using cron to set their firewall to ‘block all' to the same end. Many routers have the function built in, but it can be easily reversed.

It appears there’s a market for an anti-distraction app. Tell it how long you need to work for and everything except your office suite is thoroughly disabled, no web, no games, just work, with no easy way to reverse the result until time’s up. An ideal gift for the tyrant boss in your life and perhaps a saviour for parental home-work enforcers too?