My current anti-procrastination experiment: using trivial inconveniences for good. I have installed a very strong, permanent block on my laptop, and still allow myself to go on my favourite time wasters, but only on my tablet, which I carry with me as well.
The rationale is not to block all use and therefore be forced to mechanically learn workarounds, but to have a trivially inconvenient procrastination method always available. The interesting thing is that tablets are perfect for content consumption, so the separation works well. It also helps me to separate the contexts well, so I don’t sit on the laptop “to work” but end up browsing around. Its also good for making me self aware of what I am doing at any given time, on a physical level. Finally, I tend to reject hard restrictions, but trivial inconveniences may be a good balance.
So far, the results are very encouraging, time on hacker news and news sites is way down. I have been doing this for a couple of weeks, so I am not over the two month honeymoon yet, but if anyone else wants to give this a shot and let me know how it works out, then more data for all of us!
I have a similar experience… around two years ago, both my laptop and desktop power supplies died (power surge), leaving me a pII-300… with which I had some “let’s be authentic nineties” fun previously, so Win98 and Office 97. Except for the browser (lots of websites didn’t even load on IE4-ish browsers), so I ended up with Firefox 3.x (the newest that ran on win98).
It actually took long times with 100% CPU to render web sites. And then further time to scroll them.
My observation is the same as yours: there is nothing better to discourage random web browsing than it being inconvinient. I could look up everything I needed to stay productive, I just didn’t want to, because it was soo slow. (Having a smartphone + a non-networked computer seems to have the same effect, but with phones getting too fast nowadays, the difference seems to be diminishing...)
My current anti-procrastination experiment: using trivial inconveniences for good. I have installed a very strong, permanent block on my laptop, and still allow myself to go on my favourite time wasters, but only on my tablet, which I carry with me as well.
The rationale is not to block all use and therefore be forced to mechanically learn workarounds, but to have a trivially inconvenient procrastination method always available. The interesting thing is that tablets are perfect for content consumption, so the separation works well. It also helps me to separate the contexts well, so I don’t sit on the laptop “to work” but end up browsing around. Its also good for making me self aware of what I am doing at any given time, on a physical level. Finally, I tend to reject hard restrictions, but trivial inconveniences may be a good balance.
So far, the results are very encouraging, time on hacker news and news sites is way down. I have been doing this for a couple of weeks, so I am not over the two month honeymoon yet, but if anyone else wants to give this a shot and let me know how it works out, then more data for all of us!
I have a similar experience… around two years ago, both my laptop and desktop power supplies died (power surge), leaving me a pII-300… with which I had some “let’s be authentic nineties” fun previously, so Win98 and Office 97. Except for the browser (lots of websites didn’t even load on IE4-ish browsers), so I ended up with Firefox 3.x (the newest that ran on win98).
It actually took long times with 100% CPU to render web sites. And then further time to scroll them.
My observation is the same as yours: there is nothing better to discourage random web browsing than it being inconvinient. I could look up everything I needed to stay productive, I just didn’t want to, because it was soo slow. (Having a smartphone + a non-networked computer seems to have the same effect, but with phones getting too fast nowadays, the difference seems to be diminishing...)
It mostly works for me most of the time, but once in a while I end up spending hours reading timewasters on my phone.