Alt text of today's xkcd addresses akrasia

Cyan

The alt text of today's xkcd reads:

After years of trying various methods, I broke [the habit of clicking on my favorite distractions every 5 minutes] 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.

Anyone have ideas about how to implement this? On Firefox one can always use LeechBlock. On *nix systems there would be a number of ways of implementing this, but not all of us use that OS or have the necessary savvy.

(I'm kind of surprised no one's made a discussion post on this yet.)

The alt text of today's xkcd reads:

After years of trying various methods, I broke [the habit of clicking on my favorite distractions every 5 minutes] 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.

(I'm kind of surprised no one's made a discussion post on this yet.)

This would be very useful to me and I've been wondering about it. At work I have Leechblock for Firefox AND StayFocused for Chrome, but my computer also has Internet Explorer which I'm not sure how to handle (and I can't uninstall). And I think that regardless, something like this would be better to fix the habit rather than put a band-aid on it.

my computer also has Internet Explorer which I'm not sure how to handle

If you go to the Add or Remove Programs window, there's an Add/Remove Windows Components button. You can use that to hide the Internet Explorer icons. It won't uninstall it, though (it's built into Windows).

8

Alt text of today's xkcd addresses akrasia

8

8

8

Alt text of today's xkcd addresses akrasia

8

8