You feel yourself climbing down in it. Worthless video after worthless Youtube comment thread, you're lowering yourself down into a nasty Youtube K-Hole. "Just one more and then I'll get back on task," you tell yourself. Or maybe it's Facebook or Twitter or message boards or whatever electronic cesspool you find yourself wallowing in (4chan?). That voice (your conscience) tells you to stop, that this is mad. But you don't stop, and before you know it, you've wasted two hours and change watching clips of Mars Attacks! and ended up at "GHETTO DEAR beats up dog and cat" (real story).

At the risk of sounding like a huckster, I'm going to blab for a minute about how GD great Freedom is, and how it can help you out of an Internet K-Hole when you most need it. Freedom is not a new app, and its existence isn't news; it's just that I finally kept the thought in my brain for long enough to Google "that program that shuts off the internet," pay the $10, and download the thing, and now I want to tell you about it. Freedom shuts down the internet and network connections on your computer for a pre-determined amount of time. Nothing comes in, nothing goes out, and you can't override it by simply restarting. No e-mail, nothing.

If you're like me, and possess little in the way of self-discipline (I can't buy food in quantities because I'll eat too much), this is a blessed creation.

But don't get all excited if you're just an undisciplined worker drone that doesn't have admin access to your work computer (arguably the type that could use this program the most)—you'll need that password to download and then activate the program each time. If you've got that access, congratulations! Others, you can always download it for your home box/laptop.

Got a report/paper/article to finish but you keep checking Facebook? Shut off the internet. Waiting for an important e-mail so tensely that you keep refreshing your inbox and it keeps not being there? Shut off the internet. At home with your loved ones and want to keep yourself offline? Shut off the internet. Stuck on something, on anything? Shut off the internet. Chances are that 15 or 20 minutes away from whatever you're working on will clear your head and you'll sort out a solution anyway. I've been shutting off the internet for the full eight hours* at night and sleeping like a baby on benzodiazepines.

Now when I wake up, there's generally time left on the self-imposed blackout, and as a result I don't automatically look at the internet right away. I do things that normal humans do in the morning, like shower and eat breakfast. At night, I read myself to sleep. It's like it was in the '90s, when the internet wasn't everywhere, and it's lovely. The end.

*Careful, Freedom only counts "active minutes," so if you sleep your computer, the time isn't counted.