Mit der Corona Krise im vollen Gange haben auch mehrere gute Freunde und Ich gemeinsam nach einer Möglichkeit gesucht den am härtesten betroffenen zu helfen. Aus unseren Ambitionen erwuchs die Seite GuterSchein.de. Wie folgt will ich kurz auf die Hintergründe hierzu eingehen.
Am Liebsten würde jeder von uns gerne den am schwersten betroffnen in dieser Krise helfen. Dies sind aus meiner Sicht die Kranken sowie die Familien von Opfern des Virus. Als Informatiker und Ingenieure ohne medizinischen Hintergrund ist dies jedoch nicht so leicht wie es klingt. Die zweite Gruppe derer die diese Krise hart trifft sind die Unternehmer und viele selbständige welche aufgrund der Quarantäne und nun harten geltenden Auflagen nichtmehr ihren Geschäft nachgehen können. Für viele wird damit diese Gesundheits- auch zu einer existenziellen Krise.
Als Team kamen wir hier auf die Idee über Gutscheine den Läden und selbständigen die Möglichkeit zu geben auch in der Krise ohne aktiven Geschäftsbetrieb Umsätze zu erzielen. Die Idee ist absolut nicht neu und bereits als wir sie das erste mal diskutierten starteten gerade drei Plattformen die genau dies anbieten wollten. Uns ist klar geworden das wenn wir dies wirklich machen wollen dann kann der Weg nur sein es – richtig – zu machen. Also sich genau anzuschauen was alle anderen Gut und was sie Schlecht machen und dann mit einem professionellen Team von Technik und Management das ganze anzugehen.
Dies kostete viel Zeit, Geld und auch manchmal Nerven aber als Resultat ist nun GuterSchein.de als Plattform ganz still und heimlich Online gegangen. Mittlerweile gibt es 8 andere Plattformen. Was macht also GuterSchein den nun so anders und gibt ihm seine da seins Berechtigung?
Der Mehrwert von GuterSchein.de und unser Entwicklungsfokus:
Ein einfacher und verständlicher Aufbau. Offen für jeden, nicht nur Restaurants oder Läden einer Region. Mit sowenig Details und Informationen wie möglich aber genau soviel wie nötig sind.
Ein sauberer und durchdachter rechtlicher Rahmen. So sehr Ich selbst spontane Ideen und Projekte schätze so sehr denke Ich das die Existenz von Unternehmen und Läden eine sichere Basis braucht. Es braucht hier nicht noch mehr Probleme und Rechtsunsicherheit.
Einem klaren Mehrwert für beide Seiten. Wir sind kein Non- Profit und das ist auch gut so. GuterSchein.de soll von vornherein klarmachen das die Platform einen echten kommerziellen Mehrwert für Nutzer, Anbieter und Betreiber schafft. Nur so ist es ehrlich, nur so kann es eine Zukunft haben.
Mit GuterSchein.de haben wir eine Platform geschaffen wo Selbständige aller Branchen Gutscheine sicher und vertrauensvoll Anbieten können. Wo Kunden auch gerne einfach mal stöbern und sich so heute auch Schnäppchen für morgen sichern können und dabei wirklich etwas Gutes tun. Denn wenn man sowieso schon länger mal wieder in den Zoo wollte, warum nicht jetzt die Tickets kaufen?
Nun wird es spannend. Die Platform ist Online und es wird sich hoffentlich zeigen das es all die Arbeit Wert war. Viele Seiten haben einen Vorsprung und bieten gute Qualität in Ihren Nischen an. Für uns ist es das absolute Minimum Ziel einfach schon einmal einen Mehrwert zu leisten und kleinen Läden und Unternehmen genau jetzt etwas mit Liquidität unter die Arme zu greifen.
The goal of this post is to outline some tools for blocking out distractions from the Internet during your normally productive times. Whatever it is you define as “work to be done”, may it be, writing a book, sitting in office doing dull routine work, the Internet is always, on your phone, your watch and most obviously right at your web browser right there ready to distract you for hours. The problem I found is that at some days I am very easily distracted with my thoughts shifting around. In this state wasting time is extremely easy, just checking in on Facebook or your favorite weblog one more time to see if something interesting popped up. Maybe it did, maybe it did not, however the only thing achieved by checking it out is that you lost your focus on what you should actually do. Constantly loosing your focus drains your mental batteries and puts you in a death spiral of constantly reduced straight forward thinking. Over the years I found that I am definitely not strong enough to resist the temptation to follow up on the endless distractions on the Internet thus I tried out several means of blocking them at times when I got better things to do. Blocking distracting website such as Facebook during your most productive working hours helps you get back some productivity along with the positive feeling of accomplishment.
The methods
The is a number of tools available to block out Internet distractions. Below follows a small selection of tools I tested with highlights of what worked well. There is a dozen of things I tried which didn’t work for me, these are not included here. The overall thing to watch out for is the intelligence of procrastination. Depending on your personal computer skills the solution you choose to block distractions needs to be tamper proof and not easily circumventible. Let’s assume you got a solution which blocks sites only in your favorite browser, in the beginning this will work but at one point your intelligence kicks in and you’ll start using another browser “just to quickly check …” And again hours of your lifetime are gone wasted on the Internet.
My personal feeling tells me for all the knowledge, connectivness and efficiency the Internet has provided us since it’s existence it has by now likely killed 10 times more in what ever measuring unit worth of overall human productivity. Life is not about productivity but it most certainly is about doing what you love and this again is not very likely spending your most productive hours of the day on social media, blogs or news sites.
The Tools
Freedom.to
Blocks distracting websites based on schedules on all major platforms such as Windows, Mac and iOS.
Advantages
Schedule based, supports complex scheduling even with different settings per single device & category (desktop vs. mobile)
Supports multiple filter lists which again can be applied based on different schedules and devices
Disadvantages
Due to the way the mobile blocking (on iOS) is implemented it breaks a number of crypto apps like Threema. First I was a bit suspicious about this but it just turned out to be a poorly designed implementation of their VPN based blocking profile. Long story short, it’s unusable on mobile devices but quite usable on the Mac desktop side.
It costs a yearly / monthly fee. Their reasoning (just guessing) is that they need to operate the VPN server hardware for the traffic filtering, however if they would simply tweak their implementation just a bit this construct would become completely obsolete. However I am still ok with paying for a software on a continued basis of this furthers it’s development and ensures long time quality.
How does it work?
Freedom.to works like many older ad blocking apps by using an IKEv2 VPN profile with DNS based traffic selection, thus redirecting certain traffic, e.g. the one leading to blocked sites into the data nirvana via a pseudo VPN. No actual relevant data ever crosses the VPN. It works pretty well on the desktop but totally fails on the iPhone and iPad side. This could however quite easily be solved by using the new safari content filtering API provided by Apple to be used for ad blocking. For the mobile side I switched to a simple app called ZeroWillpower which perfectly get’s the job done without affecting your normal smartphone use.
Screenshots
Freedom.to App opening screen, note: signout is disabled during blockInstant blocking for all of your devices StayFocusedApp
This is a Mac only app, very simplistic with a simple blocking list, one timer but other than this it’s highly efficient.
Advantages
Uses the Mac OS firewall to block sources of distractions
No installation needed, comes with sourcecode
Extremely hard to circumvent, once activated it’s close to impossible to cheat it
Disadvantages
Due to the nature of the blocking, based on the network level, it causes weird issues when trying to access blocked sites. Sometimes they load but only partially as the data is fetched from the browser cache. Clearing the cache helps, something the app should maybe do for itself.
No schedules, it would be nice to have the app set to block a Window everyday from like 9am to 8pm to get some daytime productivity
Focus App (by HeyFocus)
The Focus App by HeyFocus is one of the best Apps i’ve found. It has scheduling support, does not use weird proxy ninja tactics and it does not break SSL. Also it supports blocking Apps, which could be kind of useful deepening on your personal level of addiction to certain apps.
You can get the App over at www.heyfocus.com.
Pro’s:
Scheduling support (multiple schedules and auto blocking supported)
Good use of the firewall backend to block sites across all browser without ugly glitches and SSL errors
Con’s:
At one point it failed to work after a Mac OS update this I had to switch to another app, however I am now using it again.
The block lists are not synched across devices and it is not possible to simply export and import the lists
Dozens of browser plugins for Firefox and Chrome
There exist a number of browser plugins for this subject as well. In the early beginning I used them a lot however their major drawback is that they are way to easy to cheat on. You can simply disable the plugin or even more simply use another browser such as Internet Explorer, Safari or Chrome (in case you have the blocking active in Firefox). It’s nice to see that these plugins exist however I don’t think they provide any value for professional procrastinators.
Router based blocking (Fritzbox or Squid filtering)
Without getting too much into the technical details what I learned in this regard was as following. Blacklist based blocking offered by the Fritzbox for example for child protection purposes breaks tons of SSL related stuff – long story short you end up with a broken Internet. This is caused by the Fritzbox trying to hog between you and the web server, pulling of a “man in the middle attack” thus breaking secure channels. It simply is not usable in any means.
On alternative would be to use a standard squid proxy. However let’s assume you got a squid in network up and running filtering distract live sites, just how many clicks do you think it takes to disable the proxy in your browser and surf unfiltered? Right, not enough!
Tools to block distractive apps
To mention it there is also a number of apps out there offering to block distractive apps running on your desktop. However having tried some of these I figured out that, apps running on my desktop, are not by any means my main sources of distractions. Maybe if you are heavy in online gaming than this might be worth checking out for you, for me it turned out to be irrelevant.
