I can’t say I’ve got a magic trick, but I do find work is more enjoyable if you get into flow, and flow (or at least the start of flow) is utterly interrupted by free access to the Internet. So the usual anti-Reddit devices might be helpful as an enjoyment hack as well as an akrasia hack.
I also find that my flow is very bad if the task at hand is something that requires my intervention every two minutes. If it requires constant concentration I’m fine; if I can look in on it every twenty or thirty minutes I’m fine because then I can manage to task-switch; but in between those is a sour spot where I can either sit and stare at the screen for a while long enough to be boring, or else go off and do something useless for what always turns out to be ten or fifteen minutes instead of the required two. And even then it’s hard to get started again. So, if it’s at all possible to design your workflow beforehand, you might try to avoid those check-in-two-minutes tasks, or set up three or four of them at the same time so you can context-switch effectively. I don’t know if this is relevant to your project, though.
Another trick with which I’ve had modest success is to buy some barbells, and when I get into the two-minute-wait thing I pick them up and do some lifts instead of tabbing to the internets. That way I’ve got something to do while I wait, but it’s not a Skinner-box thing that will suck me in for twenty minutes or more—I actually want to stop. This does require the activation energy of remembering to pick them up instead of doing the Alt-Tab which is much more engrained in my muscle memory. Of course you could just as easily do situps or pushups or something, but having a physical object is a useful reminder, or so I conjecture. At any rate I do more lifts than I did pushups when I didn’t have the barbells. YMMV.
I can’t say I’ve got a magic trick, but I do find work is more enjoyable if you get into flow, and flow (or at least the start of flow) is utterly interrupted by free access to the Internet. So the usual anti-Reddit devices might be helpful as an enjoyment hack as well as an akrasia hack.
I also find that my flow is very bad if the task at hand is something that requires my intervention every two minutes. If it requires constant concentration I’m fine; if I can look in on it every twenty or thirty minutes I’m fine because then I can manage to task-switch; but in between those is a sour spot where I can either sit and stare at the screen for a while long enough to be boring, or else go off and do something useless for what always turns out to be ten or fifteen minutes instead of the required two. And even then it’s hard to get started again. So, if it’s at all possible to design your workflow beforehand, you might try to avoid those check-in-two-minutes tasks, or set up three or four of them at the same time so you can context-switch effectively. I don’t know if this is relevant to your project, though.
Another trick with which I’ve had modest success is to buy some barbells, and when I get into the two-minute-wait thing I pick them up and do some lifts instead of tabbing to the internets. That way I’ve got something to do while I wait, but it’s not a Skinner-box thing that will suck me in for twenty minutes or more—I actually want to stop. This does require the activation energy of remembering to pick them up instead of doing the Alt-Tab which is much more engrained in my muscle memory. Of course you could just as easily do situps or pushups or something, but having a physical object is a useful reminder, or so I conjecture. At any rate I do more lifts than I did pushups when I didn’t have the barbells. YMMV.