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Comment by _bxg1 | Hacker News Reader

Disable all notifications except direct messages, and reminders that you create yourself.

Delete all apps that are designed to be checked over and over.

Put all other apps that could be checked over and over (finance, video streaming, shopping - believe me) inside folders, on screens behind the main screen. You should have to consciously look for them when you actually need them.

Don't sign in to any social sites in your browser, and don't let favorites or recents give you colorful icons for your frequented sites. Force yourself to type in the website you want to go to.

My home screen consists of music, direct communication, maps, notes/calendar/contacts, and the web browser. None of these can be idly checked except the web browser. They all encourage intentional interaction or none at all. Sometimes I open my phone subconsciously, look at the icons, and put it away again because there's nothing to be done.

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+1. if you want to take it a step further, move all apps to folders in the second screen. this leaves you with a blank screen when opening the phone, and essentially forces you to search for the app you need instead of browse through your apps and potentially get distracted.

i tweak my (iOS) spotlight settings to only search apps, which makes the whole flow as simple as:

  - unlock phone
  - swipe down anywhere on screen
  - type first 2-3 letters of app name
  - open app

within a few days, this gets to feel intuitive, and much quicker than paging through lots of apps. even better, it forces you to know which app you want ahead of time, reducing chance of distraction.

this may seem subtle, but it’s been huge for me in reducing idle/wasted time on the phone.

edit: formatting

You can also use the KISS launcher[0] and simplify the process, while reducing memory usage as well. It has some options to make it as minimal as possible.

[0]: https://kisslauncher.com/.

This. I use the very same method. All my apps are in a folder.

I do this but then I just type to an unsigned-in Reddit and get the crappy front page instead of at least a controllable selection of topics. The web browser is the killer of this strategy.

The web browser is problematic - HN remains a bit of a Skinner box for me - but it still denies you two important addictive mechanisms: candy-colored icons and attractive design. If there's no icon begging you to tap it, and the interface when you get there is "crappy", there's much less artificial addictiveness in the equation.

Try HN's noprocrast feature on the user settings page.

If you use Firefox on mobile I made an extension to make mindlessly browsing blacklisted sites inconvenient - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/impede/

It's undocumented but it wouldn't be hard to add. Essentially you blacklist a domain in the 3 dot menu (toolbar icon on desktop). Blacklisted sites will show a word and key-value pairs of letters and numbers, you have to add up the values for each letter in the word to unlock the page. You can change the word length in the options page, also in options you can set the extension to sleep for 5, 15, and 30 minutes when you want to disable it without having to later re-enable it.

Wouldn't you just constantly (always) disable it instead of typing a time consuming answer?

Edit: The problem (at least for me) with all these kind of solutions is that you generally need a bypass method and that method usually becomes your standard way of bypassing your anti-procrastination mechanism.

Wouldn't you just constantly (always) disable it instead of typing a time consuming answer?

I've had a couple false starts on doing a full write up answering this question but the quick answer is that it's not actually time consuming and that doing the puzzle feels like the easiest way to get to the page.

A lot of procrastination blocking apps take an abstinence based approach which predictably leads to just disabling them. Another approach - the approach my extension takes - is attacking the instant gratification that you can get to through unconscious action.

The unlock puzzle takes maybe 5-15 seconds to complete, I find that time switch of mental state is enough to cause a moment of pause and consideration for whether I want to continue browsing.

As you mentioned a bypass is necessary and I added that in the extensions option page. I find that since the puzzles themselves aren't actually hard I usually feel like it's easier to do them then navigate away from the page and back.

I think the important thing to note is this isn't intended to stop you from procrastinating when you want to procrastinate. The intent is to help you recognize when you're procrastinating unconsciously.

The idea was largely inspired by this xkcd blag post - https://blog.xkcd.com/2011/02/18/distraction-affliction-corr.... One thing I took out it was the idea that doing this action is part of a contract with myself that I don't have to feel bad about browsing as long as I do this step. That's not encoded into the extension and I'm not sure how important it is for how successful it has been for me.

I have Facebook.com, Reddit.com and Twitter.com completely blocked through content restrictions. This can be a big pain when links won’t open, but I use Reddit and Twitter far less now as time wasters.

>Disable all notifications except direct messages

If only that were easy. @here on slack and being cc'd on emails i really don't need to see makes that line frustratingly fuzzy.

>Delete all apps that are designed to be checked over and over.

Hard to do that with hacker news

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