> It’s easy to fall into habits like slacking off with Youtube, HackerNews and other social platforms – but have you ever stepped back to think how destructive it is?
> I call it the “social loop of death” where you make your rounds on various sites and before you know it, 3.5 hours have past and you haven’t gotten anything done.
> You end up getting 60 minutes worth of actual work done in an 8 hour day.
I feel like someone installed cameras in my home. This is exactly me. What's even worse, I know that I have this problem and nothing seems to help. Scheduling, website blocking, working out of home all failed after some brief time. Any other suggestions?
The only solution is to be more self-disciplined, and there is no magic trick for that. Discipline takes time and effort to develop, and you'll be disappointed with yourself plenty of times along the way. The only secret is to keep trying.
To brag slightly, but maybe add some perspective, for many years I wanted to learn to speak Spanish. Now, I'm at the point where I can read the news in Spanish with hardly any difficulty, have read a few high-school level books, and can hold conversations, even on engineering topics, without too many mistakes.
For years it was just something I kind of wanted and put off, but at some point I wanted it bad enough, that I committed, and followed through, with spending a few hours every day studying. Sure, sometimes things just came up and I missed a day or so, other times I fell into my old patterns of playing video games after work and was disappointed in myself, but everyone gets disappointed in themselves sometimes (otherwise you must have no shame whatsoever). The important thing is to just try again tomorrow.
Anyways, I didn't really mean for this to sound braggy, but I did want to answer your post. Things like working from home and organizing and/or coming up with a scheduling system helps some people, it may even help you, but you won't develop more discipline overnight. In my opinion, the only secret to becoming more productive with your time is not never give up trying to be more productive with your time.
Change your browser? There is research (I'd have to find it) that says addictive behavior is strongly attached to your environment.
The example I heard is that soldiers who got addicted to drugs overseas have a much better time at home if they quit before coming back - then the addiction is associated purely with where they served overseas, and not at all at home. We're talking an order of magnitude more successful.
Sadly, I don't remember many details - so take the above with a grain of salt. I think the above was in relation to vietnam, but I'm not sure.
Edit: You could probably do a lot with this - you could change your broswer theme, get a plugin that applies a theme to websites, switch up your desk layout, move your desk area, etc.
If you have difficulty concentrating, are easily distracted, impulsive (i.e. checks Hacker News a lot), are irritable, etc, you might look into whether you have ADD/ADHD.
I had all of those symptoms, but never considered I might have ADD until a few months ago. My doctor had me try Adderall, and the difference has been like night and day.
I'm not saying you have ADD or ADHD. I'm not a doctor. But just based off of what you said, I wanted to mention it, because I wish someone had mentioned it to me like 10 years ago.
The web has been crafted to pray on our most basic instincts to keep us coming back for more, more, more. Being addicted to the internet is more indicative of the good work by 'engagement engineers' then of a need for amphetamines.
This is literally me. I might need to go to the doctor. It's especially telling that I miss appointments frequently and have had work issues with completing people's sentences or not allowing someone to finish talking before I say something. A lot of people also tell me I'm not listening to them talk.
>completing people's sentences or not allowing someone to finish talking before I say something
That used to be me too. After I started taking medication, I was a little surprised to notice I became a lot more patient with people. Specifically, I didn't feel the need to hurry social interactions along, etc.
If you don't have to work from home, pair programming or just working next to someone with an agreement to keep each other honest could help a lot. Also (again if you're in an office with others), put your back to the door so passers-by can see your screen and tell when you're slacking off. Make your shame/guilt work for you.
Pomodoro. It trains you to stay on task for 25 minutes at a time, and evaluate how you did during the last cycle, both from a distraction standpoint and a chasing-your-tail standpoint.
Over time you build up to 4.5-6 hours of solid, head-down coding a day.
The pomodoro technique helped me enormously. I don't follow it strictly, I just set the timer and focused on one task until timer is done. I never worked the duration up, I still just do 25 minutes or less. I even put websurfing in a 25 min bucket, then stop.
I ended up learning how infrequent real emergencies pop up. Which in turn, got me to stop looking at my phone at red lights.
> I call it the “social loop of death” where you make your rounds on various sites and before you know it, 3.5 hours have past and you haven’t gotten anything done.
> You end up getting 60 minutes worth of actual work done in an 8 hour day.
I feel like someone installed cameras in my home. This is exactly me. What's even worse, I know that I have this problem and nothing seems to help. Scheduling, website blocking, working out of home all failed after some brief time. Any other suggestions?