Distraction Mitigation Strategy

07/28/14

The History

So, I'm easily distracted. Places like reddit are huge parasites to my time-management. I'd like to think of it as though there were two me's. There's productive me: he wants to accomplish things, probably wants more that can be achieved even if perfectly strived for, he also wants to prove himself and just be better; better than other people and better than his current self.

Then there's lazy me. Lazy me cares only about the least resistive path to enjoyment. There are various things that hinder his enjoyment: losing, being wrong, repitiveness, pointlessness, difficulty, tedium.

Some of these hinderances are quite useful, being competitive can keep me focused on tasks I find important, and disliking being wrong can help me correct myself. Sometimes, the dislikes conflict with each other, as my dislike of losing can interfere with my dislike of beging wrong (e.g. in an argument with someone), and this can lead to behaivior that hurts relationships and/or fail to make me a better person.

The worst thing, though, is how all of these dislikes can easily be circumvented, such that lazy me acts in a way that productive me later regrets completely. For instance, reading in general can't be something I lose at, that I'm particularly wrong about. There's enough content on the Internet to never feel repetitive or tedious. There's also so much content on the Internet that I can always pick something easy to do that's just as enjoyable as something difficult that actually creates something productive me cares about. And much of the content consumable online is intrinsically enjoyable, and thus never feels pointless.

You see why reddit can be such an effective parasite here? It makes the Internet, already a capable distraction, even more effective at distracting me from things I want to do for reasons beyond mere enjoyment.

I realized this problem a long time ago. I never tried doing anything about it until around October of 2013. It was then I took my distractions seriously. Up until then, I thought I could develop a discipline to simply stop visiting these sites, to focus on what I wanted to focus on, but I realized that brute force of will often isn't an actual solution to an actual problem. At least, not an actual problem with your internal self (plenty of problems that arise externally to you could perhaps be solved with willpower). But if an internal problem could be solved with willpower, than was it ever really a problem?

Anyways, October 2013. That's when I decided to attempt to use some actual tools to help mitigate my distractions. Enter LeechBlock (for Firefox) and StayFocused (for Chrome). And these together worked really well!

....

For a while, at least. Turning them off was too easy, and StayFocused gave me a minimum of 1-minute on any distraction site per day. 1 minute isn't a lot, but it's enough to convince me I want more, and go through the trouble of turning off LeechBlock or StayFocused for the day, often ruining my productivity for the day.

But both blockers have the option of making them un-modifiable once lockdown goes into effect. Which worked pretty well somedays and not-so-well some others. Eventually, though, it clicked into place, and I properly avoided the time-wasters for a long period of time. I didn't read webcomics at all for over a month, I think.

What happened, I think, is that I successfully switched habits, from reading various unfocused nonsense online to distracting myself with something that would eventually inspire me to get back to work in a high-functioning state. It was a great, virtuous cycle.

That I somehow lost recently. I'm back to comics and reddit and other stuff with a low-probability of long-term payoff (I think). So, now, I'm trying to wein myself on the higher-productivity distractions quicker and with less trial-and-error.

The Plan

StayFocused doesn't work for my purposes. One minute is a minute too many. SiteBlock works much better for my purposes. It immediately blocks a site, and provides custom redirection for blocked sites. It's a close approximation to LeechBlock on Firefox.

As you may know, Stephan, I actually have a website (found here), and on this site I could put some sort of webpage designed to intercept my path to distraction to something that'll bring me back to a stronger focus than before. Well, I guess there will be two: one for home and one for work.

On these pages will be reminders of things I want to do, ideas on what to do, and some questions about my state of mind to consider to best choose a next action. For now, it'll be a static HTML page, like everything else round these parts, but perhaps in the future I'll make it considerably more dynamic and engaging.