I recently decided to stop playing video games (for a week) and to stop fooling around on the internet (for the same week). The first has been fine so far, but the second is troublesome- there are a number of sites that I used to check several times per day, which I had mostly reduced to once per day, and now was trying to reduce to once per week. But the agitation from not checking them is high enough that I’ve still been checking them once per day, but at night rather than at the start of the day (and then a few times over the course of the day). I have successfully stopped checking webcomics, though, planning to go through a week’s backlog at once.
I think this is still an improvement, and an informative failure. I’m getting something out of checking those sites that I wasn’t getting out of, say, reading webcomics, and ought to drill down and figure out what that is.
I was thinking about my own repetitive checking of websites recently in the context of lukeprog’s post about Behavioral Psychology. It seems to me that the reason it is so easy to become habituated to it is because it offers “Applied Intermittent Reinforcement”. Your reward is reading some new nugget of knowledge or some great insight, but you never know for certain when & where you will stumble across it.
It’s possible, but the issue is that the sentiment is different for different sites. For example, if one of the sites I went to was a tumblr with smiling faces on it, and then I stopped going to that tumblr and I was less happy, the intermittent reinforcement wouldn’t be the important mechanism. Some of the sites- like Facebook- were very much a “almost none of this is going to be interesting enough to devote time to, but at least it’s novel” resource, and I don’t miss them when I’m not going there. So the sites that I do miss must be giving me something, but it’s not obvious yet what.
The issue is psychological, not mechanical. If I elect not to go to the site, I don’t go to the site. When electing to not go to the site causes discomfort, something else is going on that I want to examine.
I recently decided to stop playing video games (for a week) and to stop fooling around on the internet (for the same week). The first has been fine so far, but the second is troublesome- there are a number of sites that I used to check several times per day, which I had mostly reduced to once per day, and now was trying to reduce to once per week. But the agitation from not checking them is high enough that I’ve still been checking them once per day, but at night rather than at the start of the day (and then a few times over the course of the day). I have successfully stopped checking webcomics, though, planning to go through a week’s backlog at once.
I think this is still an improvement, and an informative failure. I’m getting something out of checking those sites that I wasn’t getting out of, say, reading webcomics, and ought to drill down and figure out what that is.
I was thinking about my own repetitive checking of websites recently in the context of lukeprog’s post about Behavioral Psychology. It seems to me that the reason it is so easy to become habituated to it is because it offers “Applied Intermittent Reinforcement”. Your reward is reading some new nugget of knowledge or some great insight, but you never know for certain when & where you will stumble across it.
It’s possible, but the issue is that the sentiment is different for different sites. For example, if one of the sites I went to was a tumblr with smiling faces on it, and then I stopped going to that tumblr and I was less happy, the intermittent reinforcement wouldn’t be the important mechanism. Some of the sites- like Facebook- were very much a “almost none of this is going to be interesting enough to devote time to, but at least it’s novel” resource, and I don’t miss them when I’m not going there. So the sites that I do miss must be giving me something, but it’s not obvious yet what.
Have you considered using tools like LeechBlock for Firefox?
The issue is psychological, not mechanical. If I elect not to go to the site, I don’t go to the site. When electing to not go to the site causes discomfort, something else is going on that I want to examine.