I’ve actually been off of both for a few days now. I was planning to take a week hiatus, but it’s going well (I’m more focused), so I’ll keep going through Lent.
I would be interested hearing more details about your experiences around exceptions. My inner simulator is confused about how to categorize this particular example.
On the one hand, “no Reddit at home” is a fairly clear rule that I wouldn’t anticipate too much trouble implementing. On the other hand, if the goal is to break the dopamine cycle associated with Reddit, it might be better training for your brain to stop entirely rather than “teasing” it with exceptions?
My experience (mostly involving sites like StackExchange) is that if I disallow the thing in setting A but not setting B then I mysteriously find myself using the thing a lot more in setting B. I get similar substitution effects around e.g. if I disallow addictive site X but not similar addictive site Y then I mysteriously find myself visiting Y a lot more.
I’m giving up Twitter and Reddit.
I’ve actually been off of both for a few days now. I was planning to take a week hiatus, but it’s going well (I’m more focused), so I’ll keep going through Lent.
Going to do the same.
edit: Might still look at Reddit on my phone at work sometimes when taking a break, but not at home.
I think exceptions are generally bad for this sort of thing; it’s less cognitive load to make a clean break of things.
I would be interested hearing more details about your experiences around exceptions. My inner simulator is confused about how to categorize this particular example.
On the one hand, “no Reddit at home” is a fairly clear rule that I wouldn’t anticipate too much trouble implementing. On the other hand, if the goal is to break the dopamine cycle associated with Reddit, it might be better training for your brain to stop entirely rather than “teasing” it with exceptions?
My experience (mostly involving sites like StackExchange) is that if I disallow the thing in setting A but not setting B then I mysteriously find myself using the thing a lot more in setting B. I get similar substitution effects around e.g. if I disallow addictive site X but not similar addictive site Y then I mysteriously find myself visiting Y a lot more.
On the other hand this seems to be a useful strategy to slowly upgrade the value of your leisure time, e.g. facebook ⇒ netflix ⇒ reddit ⇒ lesswrong.
I think Facebook if used properly can be a lot more valuable than Netflix and plausibly more valuable than Reddit, but yeah.
I think Facebook used properly is probably about as valuable as Reddit used properly.