# slackday: move all internet slacking to a dedicated day
whenever i felt pressure or uncertainty at work, i often turned to aimless browsing (such as hackernews) or watching youtube videos. they give me a nice relief like smoking does for the smokers. but just like with smoking, i quickly get addicted to the distraction. i then constantly need the distraction to put my mind back into the comfort zone. the need for distraction then seeps into the afterwork hours too: then i watch youtube all night and then feel overwhelmed and barely make any progress on anything.
fortunately i have a regular @/reflecting habit that catches me spiraling into madness. this habit forces me to periodically reevaluate my life and come up with new @/habits if i feel i need adjustments. this time i came up with the idea of the weekly slackday.
the idea is simple: i commit to read discussion boards, watch youtube, check blogs, look up trivia on web, etc. strictly on friday. it's like the cheat day in diets but for the internet. if i'm itching on a different day then tough luck for me. my allowlisted itch-scratching options are: writing the itch down, freewriting, leetcoding, exercising, walking, showering, daydreaming, etc. i particularly like leetcoding. tackling an easy problem is the simplest but satisfying distraction i can do that i don't feel too guilty about.
if i feel i want to look up something then i add its link or search query to my slackday todo entry. then on slackday i go through the queued stuff. simply writing the itch down helps calming it down.
# the effect
i feel more productive. i don't have access to distractions that are never-ending time sinks. so in the i end up circling back to my todo lists. if i'm not sure what to do, i just look at my oldest assigned worktask and see if i can make some progress with it. most of the time i can do that. and then i get surprised how much stuff i can get done if i don't distract myself.
my interests also seem to be changing. because my time is limited i focus more on content that is more relevant for me. i spend more time on reading golangweekly.com articles and watch less kurzgesagt videos. the latter is too generic and i never learn much from it. but it's easy to consume so i never found a way to stop watching it. now it's easy: i simply don't have time for it on my limited friday anymore.
oh and eat less junk food like potato crisps too. i used to eat it when watching youtube. but now less time for youtube, less time for junk food too.
in @/tlogging i mentioned i don't do consumption logging. but that's because consumption happened haphazardly, in the evenings or in small breaks, where such logging is inconvenient to do. but now that i'm spending time on consumption in a structured manner, doing consumption logging is easy. i started having short notes about various interesting blog posts that i could then later refer to when in future i try to make a post about those topics.
i'm doing this only for a little over two months now so the effect could be chalked up to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect too where the increase in productivity is not due to the specific change but due to being more mindful about productivity stemming after any change. nevertheless i feel pretty confident that this has a net positive effect on me. in any case i'm also writing this post to remind myself to go back to this in case i start slipping in the future.
# 100% rule
100% rule is the explanation why such absolute commitment works:
100% commitment is easier than 98% commitment.
the short story is that i don't have to waste time thinking whether i can watch a youtube video this evening or not. it's simply not allowed, end of story. here are some links explaining the idea in more detail:
i highly recommend picking up this mental trick to deal with addictions. or a variant of it: in my case i don't fully reject the internet intake, i just limit it in a very predictable manner and that works for me. the point is to pre-make the decisions so i don't have to agonize about the same problem over and over thorough the day.
published on 2024-08-05
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