Make The Internet Sleep With You

Photo by Ketut Subiyanto from Pexels

It's often irresistable to grab your phone and just scroll the night away. Or respond to a notification in the middle of the night. Or check how many internet points you've gained since an hour ago. This isn't a problem as long as you can adjust your schedule to always get a good eight hours of sleep. But this isn't usually the case, especially to those who have work, or those who have fixed schedules to follow.

Most modern routers come with some form of parental control. It allows an admin the ability to block access to specific urls, ports, and protocols from specific or all devices, at certain times of day or entire days of the week. The most common use case for this feature is to block children from viewing inappropriate sites. But I found a clever use for this feature.

I can block the internet for everyone during their sleep.

That's right, I've set my router to block all devices in the household from connecting to the internet from 12am to 7am every day. This effectively silences all devices until the next day. No notifications, no craving-driven swiping, no autoplay-induced content consumption, nothing. It's absolute and quite literal radio silence for everyone.

Now you might be asking, why can't I just use the device's "no-disturb"? Well, in a household with more than a dozen devices with devices with different manufacturers and platforms, you can immediately see that's not really an option. Besides, no-disturb only suppresses the notifications of incoming data, whereas blocking internet connection prevents the data from getting to the device in the first place. No data, nothing to notify about, and nothing to consume.

So there you have it, a little life hack to start off your year. Cheers! 🎉