[mandrake-c-papi]

I've gone through a similar process recently. I'm a stay at home dad at the moment but it's an equally large problem as when I'm working full time.

I ditched fb and Twitter years ago. I used to reddit a lot but I've deleted the app from my phone and used res to filter enough subs on my computer that it's very difficult to get lost in the rabbit hole. Getting rid of low effort subs (pics, aww, gifs, etc), click-baity and tabloid (politics, til, askreddit, etc) seems to make the place much less sticky and I quickly realise I'm wasting my own time.

For email i use tasker on android to disable my sync except for within 3 windows of the day. At 6am, midday and 6pm my sync turns on, grabs my emails and I can do what I want with them. The rest of the time I'm blocked out. I've also unsubscribed to heaps of lists accepting the inevitable that no matter what I do I will always miss something important.

I still HN though, but again it's harder to waste lots of time.

Interestingly, I feel like getting fewer little dopamine hits during the day leaves me more motivated to chase the big ones on the weekend or when i have more time.

Ultimately I need to find more productive tasks to fill my down time -no point "beating" a technology addiction and not replacing it with something worthwhile.

[ideonexus]

News is my weakness. I unfollowed all the news pages on Facebook and have made it strictly friends, which is so much less interesting that I only check it once a day. My problem is the HuffPo, DrudgeReport, FiveThirtyEight, GoogleNews cycling through again and again, desperately seeking those little dopamine hits when I get a scrap of gossip or bit of slightly novel information. This link has inspired me to reinstall the chrome extension StayFocusd, which allows you to flag sites as "restricted" and limit the amount of time you spend on them to 10 minutes or more/less. I've found it incredibly helpful in the past, but it's like calorie-counting, I have to remain vigilant as an interesting news cycle can make me disable the extension.

I agree with you completely about finding more productive tasks. Every minute I'm reading an article is a minute I'm not writing or programming. I'm currently trying to rewire my brain to open Google Drive on my phone instead of a news site so I can thumb-type some writing while I'm at the playground with my kids. If I can spend all those little moments typing out a few words of a story or novel or spend my lunch break knocking out a web app for my kids, they will all add up to mountain of productivity I can take pride in.

I'm curious what others here do to keep from websurfing all day? What are your productivity hacks to stay focused?