Installing freedom.to, which lets me deactivate websites that are distracting, and sync them acros devices. (I previously tried various things to add a delay to particular websites, not of which worked nearly as well)
I think for Freedom to work, it needed me to also have an active project I was working on that I actually enjoyed. I think otherwise I would have found other ways to distract myself and eventually undermined it to the point that I gave up.
Plus one! I tried several free tools of this nature, but managed to find loopholes and self-sabotage every single time. Shelled out 20 bucks or something for freedom, and solved the problem instantly.
I’ve long tried to block distraction in the absence of something else I enjoyed. I used Cold Turkey to commit to blocking websites for the next 1-2 months, which has the ability to add websites to the filter whenever I wanted. I use iOS Screen Time blocks to lock myself out of my own phone. The idea is that most distractions are bad coping mechanisms, but some are worse than others. For example, the internet browser on my phone is far worse for my sleep than podcasts.
Quarter-on-quarter improvements to my blocking strategy are hard to see on a graph, but I notice that removing these blocks immediately reduces my productivity by 25-70% with similarly dramatic effects on my sleep and mood. It’s closer to 70% when I don’t enjoy my current work, so mitigating distractions in this regime is possible, just difficult.
The thing that kills freedom for me is that I still see the webpage for a second before it redirects. I can see notification badges and tab into forbidden programs, but not interact with them. It gets me too close to the heroin before taking it away.
I had better luck with 5seconds, which genuinely prevents access, but it doesn’t interact well with in-app browsers, and that turned out to be an enormous pain.
it needed me to also have an active project I was working on that I actually enjoyed. I think otherwise I would have found other ways to distract myself and eventually undermined it to the point that I gave up.
Same with me. Although it’s still better than nothing: the usual distractions are more habit than actually fun, and I’ve found that I read more interesting things instead of just mindlessly browsing social media.
Installing freedom.to, which lets me deactivate websites that are distracting, and sync them acros devices. (I previously tried various things to add a delay to particular websites, not of which worked nearly as well)
I think for Freedom to work, it needed me to also have an active project I was working on that I actually enjoyed. I think otherwise I would have found other ways to distract myself and eventually undermined it to the point that I gave up.
Plus one! I tried several free tools of this nature, but managed to find loopholes and self-sabotage every single time. Shelled out 20 bucks or something for freedom, and solved the problem instantly.
I’ve long tried to block distraction in the absence of something else I enjoyed. I used Cold Turkey to commit to blocking websites for the next 1-2 months, which has the ability to add websites to the filter whenever I wanted. I use iOS Screen Time blocks to lock myself out of my own phone. The idea is that most distractions are bad coping mechanisms, but some are worse than others. For example, the internet browser on my phone is far worse for my sleep than podcasts.
Quarter-on-quarter improvements to my blocking strategy are hard to see on a graph, but I notice that removing these blocks immediately reduces my productivity by 25-70% with similarly dramatic effects on my sleep and mood. It’s closer to 70% when I don’t enjoy my current work, so mitigating distractions in this regime is possible, just difficult.
The thing that kills freedom for me is that I still see the webpage for a second before it redirects. I can see notification badges and tab into forbidden programs, but not interact with them. It gets me too close to the heroin before taking it away.
I had better luck with 5seconds, which genuinely prevents access, but it doesn’t interact well with in-app browsers, and that turned out to be an enormous pain.
Same with me. Although it’s still better than nothing: the usual distractions are more habit than actually fun, and I’ve found that I read more interesting things instead of just mindlessly browsing social media.