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.)

"During which I couldn't do anything else" is stronger than I thought at first, and suggests some kind of windowing system (input) lock. If you just wanted to introduce latency of reward, a proxy for the web page loading would be fine. I don't know which proxies have that as a standard feature.

I think a reminder (extra step to get the reward, which you can decline to execute) is good. Mechanisms that make it actually impossible to view a page or run a program (short of reboot) are stronger than I'd like or imagine I need.

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Alt text of today's xkcd addresses akrasia

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Alt text of today's xkcd addresses akrasia

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