This is kind of funny because I came to this open thread to ask something very similar.
I have noticed that my mind has a “default mode” which is to aimlessly browse the internet. If I am engaged in some other activity, no matter how much I am enjoying it, a part of my brain will have the strong desire to go into default mode. Once I am in default mode, it takes active exertion to break away do anything else, no matter how bored or miserable I become. As you can imagine, this is a massive source of wasted time, and I have always wished that I could stop this tendency. This has been the case more or less ever since I got my first laptop when I was thirteen.
I have recently been experimenting with taking “days off” of the internet. These days are awesome. The day just fills up with free time, and I feel much calmer and content. I wish I could be free of the internet and do this indefinitely.
But there are obvious problems, a few of which are:
Most of the stuff that I wish I was doing instead of aimlessly surfing the internet involves the computer and oftentimes the internet. A few of the things that would be “good uses of my time” are reading, making digital art, producing electronic music, or coding. Three out of four of those things rely on the computer, and of those three, they oftentimes in some capacity rely on the internet.
I am inevitably going to be required to use the internet for school and work. Most likely in my graphic design and computer science classes next year I will have to be able to use the internet on my laptop during class.
If I have an important question that I could find the answer to on Google, I’m going to want to find that answer.
It’s hard to find an eloquent solution to this problem. If I come up with a plan for avoiding internet use that is too loose, it will end up getting more and more flexible until it falls apart completely. If the plan is too strict, then I inevitably will not be able to follow it and will abandon it. If the plan is too intricate and complicated, then I will not be able to make myself follow it either.
The best idea I have come up with so far is to delete all the browsers from my laptop and put a copy of Chrome on a flash drive. I would never copy this instance of Chrome onto a hard drive, instead I would just run it from the flash drive every time I wanted to use it. This way, every time I wanted to use the internet, I would have to go find the flash drive. I could also give the flash drive to someone else for a while if I felt like a moment of weakness was coming on. I’ve been using this for exactly one day and it seems to be working pretty well so far.
The other thing I’ve been doing for a few days is writing a “plan” of the next day before I go to bed, then sticking to the plan. If something happens to interrupt my plan, then I will draft a new plan as soon as possible. For example, my friend called me up today inviting me over. I wasn’t about to say “No, I can’t hang out, I have planned out my day and it didn’t include you”. So when I got back, I wrote a new one. Most of these plans involve limiting internet use to some degree, so this also seems promising. I might also do something where I keep track of how many days in a row I followed the plan and try not to break the chain.
I like this idea. It’s difficult to implement; I have enough computers, but my attempt at enforcing their roles hasn’t worked so well.
I’ve had better success with weaker, outdated hardware: anything without wireless internet access, for starters. Unfortunately, the fact that it’s weaker and outdated means it tends to break, and repairs become more difficult due to lack of official support. Then they sort of disappear whenever things get moved due to being least used, and I’m back to having to put willpower against the most modern bells and whistles in my possession.
Generally speaking, the less powerful the internet capabilities, the better. Perhaps a good idea of the optimal amount of data to use would help pick a service plan that disincentivizes wasteful internet use? Or maybe even dialup, if one can get by without streaming video and high-speed downloads.
Another possibility is office space without internet access. Bonus points if there’s a way to make getting there easier than leaving (without going overboard, of course).
Or, a strictly monitored or even public internet connection for work, where anything that is not clearly work-related is visible (hopefully, to someone whose opinion/reaction would incentivize staying on task).
If possible, not even having a personal internet connection, and using public locations (Starbucks? Libraries?) when internet is necessary might be another strategy. If work requires internet access, but not necessarily active, one could make lists of the things that need downloading, and the things that do not, and plan around internet availability (this worked pretty well for me in parts of high school, but your mileage may vary).
These solutions all have something in common: I can’t really implement any of them right now, without doing some scary things on the other end of a maze constructed from Ugh Fields, anxiety, and less psychological obstacles. So my suggesting them is based on a tenuous analysis of past experience.
I have not been able to get rid of internet addiction by blocking or slowing it. Conversely I’ve had (less than ideal) success with over saturation. I don’t think it’s a thing I’ll get rid of soon, aimless browsing is to much of a quick fix. Lately I’ve been working on making productivity a quicker fix. Getting a little excited everytime I complete something small, doing a dance when its something bigger, etc.
I think there is some underlying reason for browsing as a default state, maybe conditioning. Should it then be possible to train oneself having a different default state?
Just turning off your network interface for the duration of a work session (maybe do timed Pomodoro bursts) will guard against the mindless reflex of tabbing over to the browser. Then you get the opportunity to actually make a mindful decision about whether to go out of work phase and off browsing or not. If you get legit stuff to search that isn’t completely blocking the offline work, write it down on a piece of scratch paper to look up later.
Tricks like this tend to stop working though. You’ll probably just go into mindlessly bringing up the network interface instead in the long term, but even months or weeks of having a working technique are better than not having one.
Maybe you could team up with an Ita who works with the Reticulum and become an Avout who is forbidden from it.
Yeah, I tried this for a while, along with putting Chrome in increasingly obscure places on my hard drive. After these failed, I came upon the flash drive idea, which has the feature that it involves physical activity and therefore can’t be done mindlessly. If you need to, you can throw it across the room.
I don’t mind having web browsing as a default state but what I’ve done succesfully in the past is have alarms throughout the day to remind me to exercise, leave the house, do chores, etc.
I used to live someplace close to a church with a bell tower that rang the time every fifteen minutes. I no longer live there, but I have considered writing a program to do the same thing—I recall it being useful for productivity, and for escaping default-mode (which has a terrible sense of time).
This is kind of funny because I came to this open thread to ask something very similar.
I have noticed that my mind has a “default mode” which is to aimlessly browse the internet. If I am engaged in some other activity, no matter how much I am enjoying it, a part of my brain will have the strong desire to go into default mode. Once I am in default mode, it takes active exertion to break away do anything else, no matter how bored or miserable I become. As you can imagine, this is a massive source of wasted time, and I have always wished that I could stop this tendency. This has been the case more or less ever since I got my first laptop when I was thirteen.
I have recently been experimenting with taking “days off” of the internet. These days are awesome. The day just fills up with free time, and I feel much calmer and content. I wish I could be free of the internet and do this indefinitely.
But there are obvious problems, a few of which are:
Most of the stuff that I wish I was doing instead of aimlessly surfing the internet involves the computer and oftentimes the internet. A few of the things that would be “good uses of my time” are reading, making digital art, producing electronic music, or coding. Three out of four of those things rely on the computer, and of those three, they oftentimes in some capacity rely on the internet.
I am inevitably going to be required to use the internet for school and work. Most likely in my graphic design and computer science classes next year I will have to be able to use the internet on my laptop during class.
If I have an important question that I could find the answer to on Google, I’m going to want to find that answer.
It’s hard to find an eloquent solution to this problem. If I come up with a plan for avoiding internet use that is too loose, it will end up getting more and more flexible until it falls apart completely. If the plan is too strict, then I inevitably will not be able to follow it and will abandon it. If the plan is too intricate and complicated, then I will not be able to make myself follow it either.
The best idea I have come up with so far is to delete all the browsers from my laptop and put a copy of Chrome on a flash drive. I would never copy this instance of Chrome onto a hard drive, instead I would just run it from the flash drive every time I wanted to use it. This way, every time I wanted to use the internet, I would have to go find the flash drive. I could also give the flash drive to someone else for a while if I felt like a moment of weakness was coming on. I’ve been using this for exactly one day and it seems to be working pretty well so far.
The other thing I’ve been doing for a few days is writing a “plan” of the next day before I go to bed, then sticking to the plan. If something happens to interrupt my plan, then I will draft a new plan as soon as possible. For example, my friend called me up today inviting me over. I wasn’t about to say “No, I can’t hang out, I have planned out my day and it didn’t include you”. So when I got back, I wrote a new one. Most of these plans involve limiting internet use to some degree, so this also seems promising. I might also do something where I keep track of how many days in a row I followed the plan and try not to break the chain.
I’ve found that having a two computers, one for work and one for play, has helped immensely.
I like this idea. It’s difficult to implement; I have enough computers, but my attempt at enforcing their roles hasn’t worked so well.
I’ve had better success with weaker, outdated hardware: anything without wireless internet access, for starters. Unfortunately, the fact that it’s weaker and outdated means it tends to break, and repairs become more difficult due to lack of official support. Then they sort of disappear whenever things get moved due to being least used, and I’m back to having to put willpower against the most modern bells and whistles in my possession.
Generally speaking, the less powerful the internet capabilities, the better. Perhaps a good idea of the optimal amount of data to use would help pick a service plan that disincentivizes wasteful internet use? Or maybe even dialup, if one can get by without streaming video and high-speed downloads.
Another possibility is office space without internet access. Bonus points if there’s a way to make getting there easier than leaving (without going overboard, of course).
Or, a strictly monitored or even public internet connection for work, where anything that is not clearly work-related is visible (hopefully, to someone whose opinion/reaction would incentivize staying on task).
If possible, not even having a personal internet connection, and using public locations (Starbucks? Libraries?) when internet is necessary might be another strategy. If work requires internet access, but not necessarily active, one could make lists of the things that need downloading, and the things that do not, and plan around internet availability (this worked pretty well for me in parts of high school, but your mileage may vary).
These solutions all have something in common: I can’t really implement any of them right now, without doing some scary things on the other end of a maze constructed from Ugh Fields, anxiety, and less psychological obstacles. So my suggesting them is based on a tenuous analysis of past experience.
I have not been able to get rid of internet addiction by blocking or slowing it. Conversely I’ve had (less than ideal) success with over saturation. I don’t think it’s a thing I’ll get rid of soon, aimless browsing is to much of a quick fix. Lately I’ve been working on making productivity a quicker fix. Getting a little excited everytime I complete something small, doing a dance when its something bigger, etc.
I think there is some underlying reason for browsing as a default state, maybe conditioning. Should it then be possible to train oneself having a different default state?
Just turning off your network interface for the duration of a work session (maybe do timed Pomodoro bursts) will guard against the mindless reflex of tabbing over to the browser. Then you get the opportunity to actually make a mindful decision about whether to go out of work phase and off browsing or not. If you get legit stuff to search that isn’t completely blocking the offline work, write it down on a piece of scratch paper to look up later.
Tricks like this tend to stop working though. You’ll probably just go into mindlessly bringing up the network interface instead in the long term, but even months or weeks of having a working technique are better than not having one.
Maybe you could team up with an Ita who works with the Reticulum and become an Avout who is forbidden from it.
Yeah, I tried this for a while, along with putting Chrome in increasingly obscure places on my hard drive. After these failed, I came upon the flash drive idea, which has the feature that it involves physical activity and therefore can’t be done mindlessly. If you need to, you can throw it across the room.
You could just physically unplug your broadband modem while working then, as long as you’re the only person using it.
I don’t mind having web browsing as a default state but what I’ve done succesfully in the past is have alarms throughout the day to remind me to exercise, leave the house, do chores, etc.
I used to live someplace close to a church with a bell tower that rang the time every fifteen minutes. I no longer live there, but I have considered writing a program to do the same thing—I recall it being useful for productivity, and for escaping default-mode (which has a terrible sense of time).