11–20 of 50 posts
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.
Get off HN! (observe pot calling kettle black) 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.
I found it useful to focus less on reducing time on computers etc. and more on increasing time on the things I really cared about. To use a food analogy: when a person has a great and satisfying meal, they have much less appetite to binge eat a bag of chips.
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.
For Instagram, Tiktok, and Facebook specifically, my only recommendation is to delete your accounts and exercise abstinence. Worked for me anyway.
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.
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