I goof around on the computer too much.
Back maybe a year ago, I decided this was an issue with social media and tried to kick that habit. I sort of succeeded, in that I stopped using social media, but what ended up happening instead is that I would get just as stuck scrolling random crud on the second monitor and now the crud was worse. News, mostly, if I recall correctly. Or I'd sit there just refreshing the couple slower things I decided I'd let myself keep looking at.
So I eventually realized I wasn't any happier for all that and got back to my old habits. I'm feeling the itch to do something about it again, though, and this time I'm going to say explicitly that the problem is goofing around on the computer in general and I need to take action to stop myself from doing it.
I need to disconnect completely.
From June 22 to July 31, I'm going to stop using the Internet as much as possible. This is a little more than a month, because I'm going on vacation in July for about a week. The goal is primarily to stay off social media and news sites, but I think trying to take as much offline as I can will be an interesting experience, and it'll help me stay honest.
One change I'm making this time is that I've thought ahead about what I'm going to do instead with my time and how I'm going to stay connected to the outside world. I don't think it's a good idea for me to become a complete recluse and spend eleven hours a day staring at the ceiling in my room instead of scrolling Reddit, and we are (as they say) living through a major historical event right now. As anyone who's tried to eat less knows, it's hard to back 90% of the way off an addiction to something, so I'm taking some odd measures.
The first thing I want to do is make sure I can still stay connected with my online friends. I'd love to be able to say "okay, here's the number for my IP phone, give me a call if you want to talk to me", but I need to meet people where they're at. My plan is to set up an email address (hiatus@, probably) and check that once a day or so in the evening along with my Discord DMs, strictly time-boxed to make sure I don't get caught up in it. Hopefully that's enough and people don't just say "well, I'll talk to them again when they get back". If you're reading this because I linked it from my Discord profile, hi! Don't be a stranger!
Then on the news side I'm doing something really stupid. I cancelled $45 a month worth of subscriptions to stuff that I won't be using over the course of this experiment. Guess what else costs $45 a month: the new-subscriber rate on the print edition of a well-known American newspaper1. I'm actually really excited about this. For one thing, I get a free upgrade to my morning routine (drinking coffee and reading the paper is honestly a top 10 activity), but the real big one is that once I read the newspaper, that's all the News Time I get that day. It's self-limiting. I can't even cheat on it if I want to, because the paper doesn't change if you read it again. I might supplement it with listening to my local NPR affiliate, but again there's only about three hours a day of content on that station I ever really care about.
There's a bunch of other little stuff I do online that I'm going to address on a case-by-case basis. I don't think it's going to be practical to completely stop using the Internet for research, for instance, and one of my goals here is to give myself more time and energy to do my hobbies, so if I need to look something up for a hobby project I'm going to. I'm going to keep listening to podcasts. I'm obviously going to keep doing my remote, computer-intensive job. I'm going to think a lot harder about whether it's possible to take offline alternatives, though, and I'm going to restrict myself to only using my Thinkpad T430 for this purpose and keep track of what I'm looking at for accountability.
And, of course, since the difference between screwing around and science is writing it down, I'm going to take notes. I'm really interested in what effect this experiment will have on my productivity and mood, and I'm interested to see what changing my media diet significantly will have on my thoughts around current events. I'm going to keep posting on this blog (maybe even more often, depending on how things go), and I'll start each week off with an update on how it's going.
Yes, that one. I don't like the idea of giving them my money and I have no intention of reading it uncritically, but I can't imagine they're making a whole lot of profit off my $1.43/copy intro rate and I think the benefit to me will be worth it.