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.)

That would work for your first use of a time waster, but not for repeated uses, unless you self-enforce to shut down and restart your VMware between uses. That doesn't buy much in terms of willpower, though it could be useful if rebooting disrupts your work environment.

It's no different than the "analog" method - you still have to self-enforce rebooting every time.

An issue might be that VMs (at least the ones I have) boot significantly faster than my real PC, which harms the disincentive.

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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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