Alt text of today’s xkcd addresses akrasia
The alt text of today’s xkcd reads:
After years of trying various methods, I broke [the habit of clicking on my favorite distractions every 5 minutes] by pitting my impatience against my laziness. I decoupled the action and the neurological reward by setting up a simple 30-second delay I had to wait through, in which I couldn’t do anything else, before any new page or chat client would load (and only allowed one to run at once). The urge to check all those sites magically vanished—and my ‘productive’ computer use was unaffected.
Anyone have ideas about how to implement this? On Firefox one can always use LeechBlock. On *nix systems there would be a number of ways of implementing this, but not all of us use that OS or have the necessary savvy.
(I’m kind of surprised no one’s made a discussion post on this yet.)
Munroe expanded on this in his blag. Apparently the delay comes from a self-enforced rebooting of the computer when task-switching.
An alternative is to disable time wasting internet locations (or games) on your PC and install a VMware virtual machine that is not similarly crippled. That takes enforcement out of your own hands—the VM must be loaded if you wish to use the time wasting features, no willpower required.
That would work for your first use of a time waster, but not for repeated uses, unless you self-enforce to shut down and restart your VMware between uses. That doesn’t buy much in terms of willpower, though it could be useful if rebooting disrupts your work environment.
It’s no different than the “analog” method—you still have to self-enforce rebooting every time.
An issue might be that VMs (at least the ones I have) boot significantly faster than my real PC, which harms the disincentive.
This would be very useful to me and I’ve been wondering about it. At work I have Leechblock for Firefox AND StayFocused for Chrome, but my computer also has Internet Explorer which I’m not sure how to handle (and I can’t uninstall). And I think that regardless, something like this would be better to fix the habit rather than put a band-aid on it.
If you go to the Add or Remove Programs window, there’s an Add/Remove Windows Components button. You can use that to hide the Internet Explorer icons. It won’t uninstall it, though (it’s built into Windows).
There is discussion of implementation in the xkcd forum thread about the comic.
The simplest way to implement this is with dial-up.
I have always had this problem in a bad way, but the above prescription strikes me as flimsy. What is to prevent me from disabling the technical device so that I can get my pellet of rat food? What if I need to dig through a bunch of links for whatever work it is I am supposed to be doing? It does not structurally modify incentives or behaviors.
To put it another way, if it is a huge waste of time when you are supposed to be working on something else, is it ever not a waste of time?
The best solution to the problem of wasting time for myself is something that I tripped across accidentally, leveraging social media. I found that by carefully curating the feeds of “interesting things” from various sources to maximize signal to noise ratio, which produces a surprisingly manageable stream, it made most of my usual haunts boring. Over time, I simply lost interesting in all of my usual time wasting sites because I was extracting most of the value in concentrated form by other means before I ever wandered over to those sites. Most of what I spent my time on was wading through amusing crap to find a few nuggets, but while wading through that crap it was easy to spend time on amusements. When the incentive to wade through that morass disappeared, so did my exposure to distractions.
Aggressive social curation of my news feeds, originally done because I did not have time for the raw feed, achieved a signal to noise ratio where I lost interest in most of the time wasters. All I really did was inadvertently extract in pure form most of the value that made me expose myself to time wasters in the first place. It has been the single biggest optimization in me not wasting time in ages and all it really required was aggressive culling and tailoring for quality and uniqueness of content.
It’s not prevention. It’s increasing the cost. If the startup cost of going to CNN is about the same as the startup cost of pulling out a book on my stack of books to read, and I prefer the second to the first, this will mean I always choose to read a book rather than go to CNN. However, without this fix, then going to CNN is cheaper, and so I might choose it.
Having to disable it- assuming that takes as long as the startup of something you want to do more- serves the same function.
“During which I couldn’t do anything else” is stronger than I thought at first, and suggests some kind of windowing system (input) lock. If you just wanted to introduce latency of reward, a proxy for the web page loading would be fine. I don’t know which proxies have that as a standard feature.
I think a reminder (extra step to get the reward, which you can decline to execute) is good. Mechanisms that make it actually impossible to view a page or run a program (short of reboot) are stronger than I’d like or imagine I need.