Managing Distractions

You could say (if you were inclined to cliches) that I have a love-hate relationship with the internet.

On the one hand I make my living writing software. Even though I'm fairly early in my career and am by no means a "rockstar" programmer I have enough to live comfortably and have good future earning potential. I don't have to do any manual labor or deal with irate customers. The jobs I've had have been relatively low stress and when I've gotten bored or fed up with a job it's been incredibly easy to move to a new opportunity.

I was led to this career and can directly attribute what success I've had to things I read on the internet. Full stop. But even beyond my job and related knowledge it's hard to start to calculate the value I've reaped from frequent and extended bouts of drinking directly from the information firehose. Education, personal finance, life hacks, random trivia, socializing, entertainment, online shopping, etc. etc. etc.

Despite those benefits though I believe always-on access has been harmful to me. This is not a unique idea and I probably don't need to expand on the why too much, but it's one I've been thinking about for just about as long as I've been online.

I have a really hard time dealing with distractions and escapism online. Obviously the full brunt of the blame cannot be lied on the internet alone -- all it's really served as is an outlet for negative feelings from other sources. But I'm near certain it's constant presence has exacerbated things that e.g. my parents didn't have to deal with. This harmed my grades significantly (I believe) while in school, as one example.

When I moved into my first apartment after university I actually didn't sign up for internet service. I lived for 2 years by going to Starbucks and downloading things I thought I'd want access to later, falling back to a limited cell data plan when necessary, and leaning out over my balcony holding my laptop to connect to a spotty public hotspot when I really needed to. I kept it up until just before covid when I re-evaluated the cost/benefit.

All that to say the ways that I interact with the internet have been and continue to evolve. Here's what things look like today:

• On my personal laptop (Windows 10), that I use for everything not-work, I use Cold Turkey to block distracting sites. I have two block lists, one blocking distracting sites that are zero value to me which is always enabled, and one blocking sites that I find distracting but still get some value from (reddit, HN, etc.) which is always enabled except on Sundays. Cold Turkey lets you lock these blocks such that sites can be easily added to the block lists at any time, but loosening restrictions requires entering a lengthy string of random characters. Highly recommended.
• I use Inoreader to subscribe to the rss feeds of blogs I follow, as well as new submissions on HN and a couple of subreddits. Generally I'll spend 15 or 20 minutes in the morning going through these. If there's something interesting on HN or reddit I'll star it in Inoreader and come back to it on Sunday.
• I try to follow an "inbox zero" style email policy where I archive anything that doesn't require immediate action. I aggressively unsubscribe from emails that are low value. (In the past this has worked until it doesn't, at which point I give up and my inbox gets larger and larger until I purge everything and start over.)
• On my work computer I use the same block lists from Cold Turkey as on my personal machine, but block both constantly. I strive to only ever use this machine when doing things directly for my job.
• On my phone (an iPhone) I use Screen Time to block Safari and new app installs. I leave only a boring set of apps installed. I set a passcode required for any changes, write it down in an old journal, and forget it. (I've tried blocking all websites in addition to Safari previously but this breaks some e.g. banking apps that rely on an in-app browser.)
• I plug my router into a digital timer that automatically turns off at 9:00pm and turns on again at 6:00am.

The above have so far proved a fairly effective means of managing how I interact with the internet without requiring much day-to-day willpower. A few set-and-forget steps and a couple of habits to build. The failure mode seems to be that I undo one or more of these, either because I really need to to accomplish something useful, or the siren song of escapism just gets too strong, and then the system stays broken for a number of days until I catch myself and summon the willpower to reset things.