Tools to avoid mind candy
Sometimes you need a little help from technology to help you avoid technology.
This will probably be the last post for a while about the mind candy fast that I've been on this week. I've enlisted the help of a few tech tools to help keep me on the straight and narrow when it comes to my use of tech. It's a constant arms race to outsmart myself and get me to just do the dang thing I want to do.
- Closing apps that have notifications, and disabling noisy notifications as much as possible. Notifications are another type of mind candy that hits me particularly hard. I think largely driven by my other consumption behaviors, I find myself self-distracting during what should be focused work time, seeking out notifications and things to respond to. I've tried to be good by disabling notification pop-ups and sounds, and I hide the dock on my computer so I don't immediately see the little red dot. But that just means in a moment of distraction that I will mouse over the dock to see if there are any notification dots (usually Slack or email), then go to read and respond.
- I use Alfred with my laptop, and created a little script I can quickly run to close the main problem apps like Mail and Slack. It works, but I need to be better at using it.
- Unhook. Unhook is a browser plugin that allows you to customize the way YouTube looks. I've used it to hide the algorithmic homepage, Shorts, and comments and recommended videos from the video page. This makes YouTube less enticing as a time suck.
- RSS feeds. Instead of letting algorithms decide what to show me , I use RSS feeds (available, but hidden on most websites) to subscribe directly to the things I want to follow. News sites, blogs, YouTube, and even Reddit provide ways for you to subscribe to specifically what you want so you can avoid the distraction of algorithmic recommendations designed to keep you scrolling
- Hosts file. Little bit more techy: I've edited the hosts file on my computer to block myself from accessing Hacker News, Facebook, Reddit, and other sites. If I need to access the site, I can pretty quickly edit the hosts file, but the little bit of friction from doing that is often enough to keep me from mindlessly popping onto those sites during little breaks in the day.
- Grayscale mode. Sometimes I will turn my phone to grayscale mode (you can too). Research has shown this is an effective way to reduce screen time. While the research didn't dig into why that is the case, my experience suggests that my phone in black and white serves as a visual reminder of my desire to be on my phone less. That, and without the color, it is just less visually stimulating and a little bit harder to use, so I put it away more easily.
- Having better things to do. Okay, this one isn't a tech tool, but it is an important part of developing habits. When I am sitting in my car waiting for a kid to come out of sports or any of the other little moments in my day when my phone used to come out, I need better things to do. I've replaced the mind candy with reading actual articles that come across my news feeds, reading Dune Messiah, and, for the moment, researching cars since I'm in the market for a new one. Or sometimes I'll just sit and think. I'm trying to do even more of that.
I've used a bunch of other tricks in the past to help myself focus, but these are the ones I'm using at the moment to address the needs of my dumb brain.
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