Ask HN: How do you fight YouTube addiction and procrastination? I'm struggling

I'm a programmer, a creative person, working on my projects, and regularly I need a short break, so on every break I usually lay in bed and checked the news and I often ended on YouTube watching more videos, wasting hours every day. What eventually helped me was use css to replace entire YouTube (and other doom scrolling websites) with a motivational picture that says:

"One day, you'll realize that your dream died because you chose comfort over effort. Don't let that regret haunt you forever."

And it worked.

The css for yt looks like this:

    body {
     min-height: 100vh;
     background-image:url(https://example.com/effort.jpg);
     background-size: contain;
     background-repeat: no-repeat; 
     background-position: center; 
     background-color: black;
    }
    p,div,h1,span {display:none}

It's been 6 months and it's still working.

Your routine seems completely normal. This is Not Youtube addiction and procrastination. You work 8 hours - that's already your productivity. The idea that your personal time also needs to be optimized and highly productive is tech bro nonsense.

After a full workday, your brain wants easy dopamine. That is being human. You're not a startup. The people posting about 5am routines are just performing productivity online.

Maybe go to bed earlier or be more mindful when it comes to digital dooms scroll.

Other than putting screen timers on all my apps, I've found that physically leaving my phone in other rooms to be helpful. Also recognizing it as a problem and acknowledging "Agh, I'm doing it again" when I get caught in a doom scroll hole at least puts some counterweight to the problem.

I also keep my laptop by my couch so I reach for it vs my phone. I hate typing on my phone so I end up just clicking on a dopamine drip app rather than actual reading / work which I tend to do more readily on a laptop or desktop.

It is a behavioural problem at the end of the day. Which means it will take discipline and accepting some feelings of discomfort up front to change for the long term.

Turns out that the future was better pocket TV

Disable history.

When it is disabled the yt screen will not contain any recommendations and will actually be empty. After you do this, you'll find yourself dozing off to yt on occasion and reaching a blank screen only to realize you didn't actually come to watch something specific but more as a force of habit and you'll lose the trigger. I recommended this to a couple of friends of mine and they all say it worked wonders.

I'm not sure if you only have to disable history or some other options as well, but basically you want a blank screen when you reach yt. You can still have subscriptions, but the idea is that you intentionlly look for what you want to watch instead of having the yt screen recommendations offering videos and you choosing.