[shawndrost]

I want to reiterate my homegrown solution to digital addiction: lock your devices and hand the key to a trusted individual human, the "keyholder".

The keyholder's role is simple. When I ask them to choose a password and type it in without telling me, they do that. When I ask them to share the password with me, they do so. The keyholder role is not about outsourcing discretion or approval around addiction. Instead, the keyholder changes the mechanism by which I access my addiction, in a way that disempowers my "animal brain" in its inner struggles with my "wise man brain". I've had several keyholders at different times; my wife, since I got married, and before that it was a mix of coworkers, roommates, and friends.

Locking devices: On iPhone, I set my own parental controls to 1) limit social media/games to 10 minutes per day, and 2) block the web. Then I had my keyholder change my passcode. On my computers I modified /etc/hosts (and /etc/resolvers/* for wildcard domain matching) then yanked sudo from my daily driver login. Keyholder has the password to the admin account. Updating apps is the main pain point on both platforms.

If you set this up, let me know how it works for you. And, if there is a piece of software that automates the above (in a way that does not give me a simple "let me do the thing" button) please share!

[pooriar]

I like this idea. Don't know if I could go without `sudo` on my computer though, I tend to use it for work...