[DoingSomeThings]

Alt Text: After years of trying various methods, I broke this habit by pitting my impatience against my laziness. I decoupled the action and the neurological reward by setting up a simple 30-second delay I had to wait through, in which I couldn't do anything else, before any new page or chat client would load (and only allowed one to run at once). The urge to check all those sites magically vanished--and my 'productive' computer use was unaffected.

Earlier this year a link on HN introduced me to Clearspace (no association). It does exactly this. When I load an app, it forces a time delay and asks me to set the time I want to spend in it.

I've found this remarkably effective. Much more so than previous attempts to simply cold-turkey.

https://www.getclearspace.com/

[isoprophlex]

In app purchases: Clearspace Premium (49.99/yr)

God I hate the business models of $CURRENT_YEAR

[mi_lk]

> by setting up a simple 30-second delay

anyone knows an easy way to set this up from laptop?

[fdgjgbdfhgb]

I use Leechblock on Firefox (including mobile) [1]. It's also available on Chrome [2]. You can set delays, hard block, set custom time ranges (i.e. only block during working hours), make it overridable, and a lot more.

I really dig it, it helped me stop using Reddit :^)

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/leechblock-ng... [2] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/leechblock-ng/blaa...

[twiclo]

Does this let you set a timer like described in the comic? I can't see it. I'm looking for something that makes me wait a minute before allowing a specified site to load.

[kzrdude]

It seems like it. Pick a site, choose to block it all day, use blocking method delaying page and set delay time to a selected number of seconds. Seems to work, but haven't tried this configuration before. One has to sit through the delay, if you switch context, the countdown stops(!)

[fdgjgbdfhgb]

As the other commenter mentioned, that'd be the Delay page. I use 60 seconds for sites like hackernews at work and it really curbs the impulse to waste time while still allowing you to use the site if you really want to.

[bsimpson]

This sounds like a relatively easy thing to build a Chrome extension for.

I also don't know if I'd want a random Chrome extension having access to my social media cookies.

[DoingSomeThings]

In previous experience with browser extension solutions, I unfortunately found it way too easy to "remove from chrome" when I wanted to get around the block.

Ultimately you can't program around self control and determination. There's always a limit to baby-proofing yourself and that's an indictment of me more than any program. However what I appreciate about the system level phone solution is that there's no easy to immediately remove it.

On a phone, the barrier to uninstall is larger than the barrier to waiting 15 seconds. The effort reverses in a browser.

I'd probably need a system level solution to effectively work for me on laptop.

[twiclo]

There's a clearspace chrome extension

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/clearspace/geebjpi...

[twiclo]

I found this. Seems to work well:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/one-sec-%E2%8F%B3-...

[rc5150]

56k modem.