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<i>After years of trying various methods, I broke this habit by pitting my impatience against my laziness. I decoupled the action and the neurological reward by setting up a simple 30-second delay I had to wait through, in which I couldn't do anything else, before any new page or chat client would load (and only allowed one to run at once). The urge to check all those sites magically vanished--and my 'productive' computer use was unaffected.</i><p>Earlier this year a link on HN introduced me to Clearspace (no association). It does exactly this. When I load an app, it forces a time delay and asks me to set the time I want to spend in it.<p>I've found this remarkably effective. Much more so than previous attempts to simply cold-turkey.<p><a href="https://www.getclearspace.com/">https://www.getclearspace.com/</a>
I suggest people who read a lot of news to read up on Rolf Dobelli's book named Stop Reading the news.<p>I found it an eye-opener and have since blocked all news websites on every device. Currently 3 weeks without a newspaper and I don't feel I am missing a thing.<p>The best chapters were the ones were he explained with great examples how irrelevant the news was, how news would make you less creative and feel much smaller than you really are.<p>Now, he also clearly tries to distinguish news and longreads. If your paper is a daily paper than tries to be very generic... you can skip it. If your paper is a medical journal and your profession is a doctor. Keep reading that medical journal.<p>For all social media... just delete your account and hold out for a week of withdrawal symptoms. You won't miss a thing.