a lot of problems aren’t huge problems in-and-of themselves, and it’s the flight to distraction and stimulation that compound the problem and create bad ongoing habits
This reminds me of a technique I use sometimes called Doing Nothing, described inthis blog post, where instead of what you call ‘flying to distraction’ , you just don’t do anything at all. You say “I don’t have to write this paper right now, but I’m also not going to do anything else”. You have the freedom to sit there blankly doing nothing at all for as long as you want, and generally it’s not long before you stumble upon some new ideas or motivation to carry on.
A similar work guidline to Do Nothing is Take boring breaks. You allow yourself to take a break from your work when you “feel like it”, but the break has to be something plain like getting water, going to the bathroom, or stretching.
I limit my ability to take fun breaks by blocking sites like Twitter and Reddit, or any site I’m spending a lot of time on. When I take a break I have nothing interesting or distracting to do, and soon I’m bored enough to start working again.
Ah! I independently invented this strategy some months ago and amazingly it doesn’t work for me simply because I’m somehow capable of remaining in the “do nothing” state for literally days. However I thought it was a brilliant idea when I came up with it and I still think it is, I would be surprised if it doesn’t work for a lot of people.
This reminds me of a technique I use sometimes called Doing Nothing, described in this blog post, where instead of what you call ‘flying to distraction’ , you just don’t do anything at all. You say “I don’t have to write this paper right now, but I’m also not going to do anything else”. You have the freedom to sit there blankly doing nothing at all for as long as you want, and generally it’s not long before you stumble upon some new ideas or motivation to carry on.
A similar work guidline to Do Nothing is Take boring breaks. You allow yourself to take a break from your work when you “feel like it”, but the break has to be something plain like getting water, going to the bathroom, or stretching.
I limit my ability to take fun breaks by blocking sites like Twitter and Reddit, or any site I’m spending a lot of time on. When I take a break I have nothing interesting or distracting to do, and soon I’m bored enough to start working again.
Ah! I independently invented this strategy some months ago and amazingly it doesn’t work for me simply because I’m somehow capable of remaining in the “do nothing” state for literally days. However I thought it was a brilliant idea when I came up with it and I still think it is, I would be surprised if it doesn’t work for a lot of people.