After posting on social media, I found myself refreshing my notifications quite often. Do you know that feeling? If so, how do you overcome it?
What works quite well for me:
- An app that blocks distracting sites (I'm using Freedom)
- Change that pattern by changing my habits (e.g. excluding my phone from the morning routine)
Edit: A complete deletion is not really an option since I enjoy Twitter, Reddit, HN to stay up-to-date with the tech world :)
- Blocked reddit at a dns level across my entire network via pihole (I run a personal vlan so the rest of the house network wasn't affected).
- Disable my internet completely on this vlan after working hours via a schedule in pfsense.
I get around the reddit block sometimes by enabling a VPN, which is only a few button clicks. But since this work around causes me extra steps, it makes me pause to think 'do I really want to aimlessly browse reddit?' which the answer is usually no, so I usually stop in my tracks there and get back to work/whatever.
The entire internet being cut was more about configuring a sleep schedule instead of blocking dopamine.
The big take away: make it hard to access the content. The extra step makes you mindful of your time.