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.
What is to prevent me from disabling the technical device so that I can get my pellet of rat food?
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.
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.