Also remarkable was that for the first time in years, I was keeping my room clean. It was remarkable how quickly the urges to constantly check those sites vanished. (If you have one of those instant-boot laptops, you’re out of luck.) The only catch is that you have to stare at a startup screen for 30-60 seconds first. Want to play Manufactoria until your eyes bubble? Absolutely. Feel like looking at Reddit for the 20th time today? Go for it you might find something interesting (hey, it’s where I found that dopamine article).
#UNDISTRACTED FIREFOX CRACKED#
Want to go read a 17-part Cracked article? Fine! Think you might have an important email? Go check. Without that connection dominating my decisions, I could think more clearly about whether the task was really important to me.īeyond that one rule, I put no other restrictions on myself. Adding the time-delay removed the promise of instant novelty, and perhaps helped disconnect the action from the reward in my head. Reward was briefly unavailable from the project, but constantly available from the internet.
#UNDISTRACTED FIREFOX HOW TO#
I’d sit down to write code, draw something, build something, or clean, and the moment I hit a little bump-math I wasn’t sure how to handle, a sentence I couldn’t word right, an electronic part I couldn’t find, or a sock without a mate-I’d find myself switching to one of these sites and refreshing. In my case, I felt like my problem was that whenever I was trying to focus on a (rewarding) project, these sites were always in the background offering a quicker and easier rush.
There’s some interesting research about novelty and dopamine, suggesting (tentatively) that for some people exposure to novelty may activate the same reward system that drug abuse does. I’d decide this day needed to be an exception for some reason, think of a project that required the computer, or just grow frustrated after a few hours and get really curious about something I’d seen a website somewhere. Blocking the sites (or keeping the computer off) didn’t work-I could always find a way to argue with myself. Other ‘honor system’ approaches have never worked for me. (This works best if your ongoing activities are persistent online-for example, all my IRC chat is through irssi running in screen, so turning off my laptop doesn’t make me sign out.) But if I decided to look at a website, I’d have to wait through the startup, and once I was done, I’d have to turn it off again before doing anything else. There was no struggle of willpower I knew that after I hit the button, I could decide to do anything I wanted.
al., before I had time to think too much, I’d start the shutdown process. The rule was just that the moment I finished (or lost interest in) the thing I was doing, and felt like checking Google News et. I could turn it back on right away-this wasn’t about trying to use the computer less. I made it a rule that as soon as I finished any task, or got bored with it, I had to power off my computer. Lots of people have asked me for the system I used to implement the restriction in the alt-text of today’s comic.Īt various times, I thought of doing it with an X modification, Firefox extension, a Chrome add-on, an irssi script, etc-but none of them worked too well (or involved a lot of sustained undistracted effort, which was sort of a Catch-22).
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