The motivation

February 02, 2023

When I was a child, I struggled seriously with self control. I’d routinely play League of Legends late and uninstall at the end of the night, filled with regret. Only to reinstall the game the next day. And I beat up myself a lot for that. Here’s are some thoughts I had that had manifested for multiple years:

In college, I tried many time management/self-control apps without much success. What I needed was something that could turn a serious burst of motivation into powerful, lasting habits. When I was being especially serious or close to failing, I’d hand off my computer mouse or Windows SSD to a friend and hope that the effort and shame of having to ask for it back would stop me from going back on my word. And this worked to an extent -- but I wanted to keep the functionality of my computer. And I wasn’t alone — I saw peers doing similar things as well to make up for their lack of self-control and to mitigate bad habits.

I spent lots of time reading about self-control and you can find more about that in our blog post On self control - an introduction

I’m starting Untethered Key to give your self-control a physical instance, allowing you to better take control of your issues outside of your device, allowing you to fight Big Tech from an fair playing field -- real life.

untethered