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.)

Munroe expanded on this in his blag. Apparently the delay comes from a self-enforced rebooting of the computer when task-switching.

Munroe expanded on this in his blag. Apparently the delay comes from a self-enforced rebooting of the computer when task-switching.

An alternative is to disable time wasting internet locations (or games) on your PC and install a VMware virtual machine that is not similarly crippled. That takes enforcement out of your own hands - the VM must be loaded if you wish to use the time wasting features, no willpower required.

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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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