Dru's Notes

I was on a Trends.vc Masterminds call when the host asked what move had a payoff that wildly outran its cost. Curfew was my answer: an app that blocks YouTube on my laptop until 4pm.

Show Notes

I was on a Trends.vc Masterminds call when the host asked what move had a payoff that wildly outran its cost. Curfew was my answer: an app that blocks YouTube on my laptop until 4pm.

Featuring: Gustave Flaubert, Jonathan Franzen

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Chapters:

(00:00) What Payoff Wildly Outran What It Cost You?
(00:18) Curfew and the 15 Hours a Week
(00:38) Jonathan Franzen's Sawn-Off Cable
(00:59) Decide Once, Never Daily

Where to find Dru:

Essays: https://druriley.com/
X: https://x.com/DruRly
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@dru-notes
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/drus-notes/id1888795427
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3lFHqgKxuvEHmdiEUfYShG

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Creators and Guests

GF
Guest
Gustave Flaubert
Featured in Dru's Notes: How I Quit My YouTube Addiction.
JF
Guest
Jonathan Franzen
Featured in Dru's Notes: How I Quit My YouTube Addiction.

What is Dru's Notes?

One mental model each day in a few minutes. Habits, business, building products and thinking clearly. From Dru Riley, founder of Trends.vc.

"Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work."
Gustave Flaubert

I was on a Trends.vc Masterminds call when the host opened with a question for the room.

"What's the latest move you made where the payoff wildly outran what it cost you?"

Curfew was my answer, a small app I built that blocks YouTube on my laptop until 4pm.

For months I watched YouTube, at times up to 5am.

In Curfew, I set one boundary, a window that blocks YouTube outside of 4pm to 9pm. That boundary gave me back at least 15 hours a week.

The novelist Jonathan Franzen believed he couldn't write serious fiction on a computer that could reach the internet, so he pulled the wireless card out of an old Dell laptop. That left the ethernet port.

"What you have to do is you plug in an Ethernet cable with superglue, and then you saw off the little head of it."

That permanently blocked internet access on his machine.

Automate the boundary and you decide once. Leave it to willpower and you decide again each day.

What are you re-deciding daily that you could automate once?