For example -- "I've been anxious lately, I should sit down and journal in my physical notebook for 5 minutes" or "I haven't taken a lot of play time to myself lately, let's go read something offline for 30 minutes."
Re-framing it slightly so it feels like a practical suggestion to immediately do something from somebody else to myself helps break down a lot of the procrastinationation loops, imo. Triggers that "I want to be useful" feeling.
I also have almost entirely gotten off social media, helped by putting specific Twitter users and subreddits into my NewsBin feed, where it's much easier to avoid algorithm influence. I open the apps or websites only if I want to respond or ask a question.
Coin acceptor is connected right to OpenWrt router via USB. Once you put a quarter, it turns on Internet for 30 more minutes.
Dispenser is connected to PC with the app where he has to solve (not very hard) math puzzles. When you reach the score of 10, the coin is getting dispensed.
Internet usage is down 2-3 times now, compared to what it was before.
Even if you have a router in another room with a single physical button attached via USB, you'll be lazy going to another room to turn the Internet on. Have a book by your place and you'll see how much you started reading.
Reach out if you need OpenWrt router hacking help.
Is the router off for everyone when disabled or is it like an IP based block using the router's API to add and remove blocks on demand?
Like you, I also do not use social media beyond HN.
They let you create a highly flexible schedule (e.g. lunch breaks), and even support Pomodoro Timers (e.g. 20 on, 20 off, etc). But the biggest feature is privacy respecting (i.e. non-cloud, non-sharing data with advertisers) and non-subscription. It is just an old-fashioned desktop application with several browser extensions.
They have some nice website lists to save initial setup time like "social media" or "shopping" that will nuke all the big names. But they support wild cards or even application specific blocks. HN isn't in the "social media" list by the way.
It is designed to be hard to bypass/disable/modify. Even how each individual block's settings are locked is very configurable, which is nice.
The UI does suffer from the "invisible button" trend, so you'll have to figure out that there are three buttons under each block none of which look like clickable buttons (schedule config, break config, and settings-lock config). Also, the "On" button enables/disables the SCHEDULE rather than the block itself. So if a block isn't working after scheduling making sure it is "On" too.
PS - No doubt I'll get crapped on by the "just self-control" crowd. I'd argue that if this problem was easily overcome, people wouldn't be making threads on the topic and continuing to have problems. I don't think application enforcement should be anyone's long term goal, I see it more like a Nicotine Patch, a temp middle-ground to help make achieving your goals easier.
Reddit/HN are less appealing when you can't interact with someone, especially if you feel they're wrong and correct info needs to be supplied.
If you really want to stop doing something, don't place yourself in a situation where it's easy to do so.
I can only keep away by "internally" rating the whole platform as trash.
It’s a lot tougher than /etc/hosts: Disabling it during a locked block is very hard. That’s perfect for me.
I permanently blocked all news sites and gave me an allowance for HN.
There are also extensions that remove the recommended feed from Reddit, so you can still interact with pages found from search, but can’t discover new content once on Reddit. That greatly reduces my time spent there.
1. demand more. If a headline can't prove to you that it is relevant, it isn't. This essentially cuts out all click-baits, but that is just the start of it. If Twitter and/or Facebook doesn't _consistently_ provide value to you, they are out. I have a couple of people who insist on organizing things on Facebook, but I just check my notifications (on the site), I don't look at the feed because it does not provide enough value.
Reddit is my big issue. I spent way too much time on r/news, r/ukraine etc so I have decided just not to visit reddit until september, then I will have to reevaluate it.
2. Intentionallity. Many sites can be very valuable or a complete waste of time. I have spent a lot of time on YouTube, but I have also gotten a lot of value out of it. I have also watched a lot of videos that were not very valuable.
I definitely still struggle with intentionallity, but the idea is that you spend your time on something you want, not what diverse algorithms want you spend the time on.
In general: your eyeballs are very important and I think it is fair that you demand a high price for your attention. That doesn't mean that you have to be productive at all times, being paid in fun is fine, being paid in aweinspiringness or whatever else you value is fine too.
But demand a high price for your attention.
The key is to note on how you feel afterwards: if you feel queizy and slightly-to full on regretfull, then you should change going forward. If you feel happy then, fine, you just spent a lot of time on something you enjoyed - there is no problem with that.
2nd I also blocked via browser any images so I have only text
3rd I try to learn or read about things that fit into my interest zone while avoiding anything else
4th Since I live with my gf I try to spend as much time as possible with her (talking mostly), this way we're both off the distracting internet sources
I value my time more since I'm in my mid 40s, I don't think I waste my time on the internet if I'm reading about something that (see point 3)
When I was a child and right after high-school, the internet was either non-existent or not-accessible. But I do believe that it's the most beautiful thing invented in the last century, it's mind blowing how much can you learn/see/find if you don't waste your time into scroll/click spiral.
If you know where to look/search, there are treasures everywhere on the internet.
I spend a lot of time here especially when I don't have anything better to do but I wouldn't call it a waste.
If you had been on Facebook etc then yeah that is a total waste. I think you're doing pretty well already.
Of course shit posting is often much more enjoyable than "doing [x]" or we wouldn't be doing it in the first place, so there's some life balance issues - but it's a real consideration nonetheless. I often wonder how many Einsteins went without ever truly finding their niche; not because of lack of development in some area, but because of it! The internet can provide endless addictive entertainment and enjoyment, even of a higher brow nature. It's easy to lose yourself in it.
I've also turned off history auto-suggestions in my search/URL box, so that when I look for a website it only suggests relevant work locations I define in my bookmarks.
I can (and often do) open a secondary browser to waste my time with, but I don't do it quite as impulsively. And when I'm ready to go back to work, I just kill that second browser window, and I've effectively removed myself from the distracting context
How to Work Deeply ?
How to decide on your depth philosophy ?
Ritualize your deep work
Make Grand Gestures
Embrace Boredom
Drain the shallows
Quantifying the depth of the work you do.
For Instagram, Tiktok, and Facebook specifically, my only recommendation is to delete your accounts and exercise abstinence. Worked for me anyway.
It's hard, honestly, to do work on computers, because they're rife with distractions. When I want to read, I deliberately leave my phone in the other room. When I can, work things out with pen&paper, again, phone and computer in another room -- but it's rare that a problem I'm working on can be approached with pen&paper.
It's a pretty simple and free solution, takes maybe 10 minutes to install and configure.
Yes there are fairly easy ways to get around the blocks, but 90% of the time I'm able to respect the block and so it saves hours of time daily.
Whenever I find myself doing this it’s always because I am avoiding something (either doing something or thinking about something).
Find out what those things are, and deal with them.
That's up there with "just be more happy" (for depression), "just exercise," "just eat less food" (for obesity) in terms of being entirely unconstructive.
Yes, chronic procrastination is an avoidance technique but "just do it" isn't actually an effective strategy to overcoming it.
Here's a video that people suffering from this may actually find helpful:
It offers actionable advice and strategies.
The other advice given if “install this software to block sites” may not actually work since without the sites they’ll just find for another way to distract themselves
Productivity is temporary, discipline is forever.
You can still do everything you need, but everything will be awful, and you'll not enjoy doing anything you only want to do.
forced breaks are good for getting exercise throughout the day.
when you sit back down you can CHOOSE to go back to time wasting, or not.
We live in a pretty strange world, strange in a new way: we can interact with anyone in the world and we can learn anything we want with minimal effort. We can also endlessly be entertained passively if we choose to do that.
You don't really think about it much, but before smart phones we had to set time aside and go sit at a desktop machine to use the internet, so you had to actually have something to do, or time to kill. Before the internet, we used to loaf around reading books, sipping on tea, flipping through television channels, and before television we used to have a ton of downtime. We didn't stress over the downtime that much because it was just a fact of life.
Now that we can be productive in some way all the time due to the internet, we tend to think of the time we spend doing nothing as a waste, a new phenomenon brought on by phones, but it isn't really true. Human beings have always spent about half their waking hours loafing about. The ones that loved learning read book after book. It's never been easier to read book after book than it is now.
So are you actually wasting time? What are you reading? Reddit has a very bad signal to noise ratio, especially as of late, but there's valuable stuff there. HN is quite a bit better, but still a lot of it will be uninteresting to some and interesting to others.
I spend a lot of time reading on my phone. Books, articles, conversations on this site, and I've improved my vocabulary and command of the English language immensely, I've learned quite a bit on a wide set of topics, I can read Cyrillic and Greek phonetically and I can walk you through the particles in the standard model and what their properties are, I know a bit about information theory, and a bunch more. I couldn't dream of doing all this learning 30 years ago with just a public library available, it would've cost me hundreds of thousands of dollars and taken me insane amounts of time to source the material. I'd be sitting around watching TV drinking miller lite believing things like "if you ask a cop if he's a cop he has to tell you" because I'd have had no way to easily check if what someone told me was true.
It's likely you'd have wasted more time if smartphones didn't exist. This idea that every waking moment needs to be productive is incorrect. Before smartphone you'd probably spend most of your free time watching TV and drinking beer.
So if what you do on your downtime is rewarding, it's not a waste. And if you're like me and you soak up information like a sponge and love learning, these devices are a blessing. Just decide not to spend downtime doing things that aren't rewarding to you, downtime is not the problem, being unhappy with how you spend it is. Learning interesting things is certainly not a waste of time, and neither is watching egirls on twitch if that's what you enjoy, because you'd have been watching married with children reruns otherwise.