.2 - Distraction Free January

2024-12-30

I'm personally not very fond of new year's resolutions, for a number of reasons, they tend to be over-hyped and then forgotten a month or two into the year and there is no reason to change something only on new year, if someone wants to improve something about themselves the best time to do it was yesterday, but the second best time is right now, not in a couple of days or months.

My journey with distractions

That is what I've been doing for a couple of years, I've been slowly leaving most social media websites to be able to spend more time doing things that I like instead of wasting away on my phone. It hasn't always been easy though, Facebook and Twitter for example I barely used to start off so not much had to change for those, but Reddit on the other hand.... 2 seconds bored was enough to get me to pull out my phone and open Reddit on auto-pilot. I knew that it wasn't helping my mental health at all and not being able to sit alone with my thoughts for more than 2 seconds was quickly degrading my motivation and creativity, so I tried to reduce the time I spent there multiple times to no avail.

But then something happened, a pot that had been stirring on Reddit about some changes to its TOS and API was finally starting to boil, tld, people were really mad, the person in charge of Reddit didn't give a darn and actual Reddit mods (the ones hired by the company, not the volunteers that actually make communities function) started deleting posts and comments that criticized the changes, quarantining communities that where vocally against the changes and even kicking out a lot of moderators from established communities to take control of the situation, so on June 10th 2023 I made my last comment on Reddit (a comment that was also deleted by the same moderatos) and left, logged out and even uninstalled the app from my phone, I had spent over 8 years regularly using that platform, and almost immediately I felt empty, but in a good way, for the next couple of days I still felt the urge to do something when I was bored, but I no longer wanted to open up Reddit to just numb my toughs, I actually became productive, for a while that is....

It didn't take long before the habit of opening Reddit translated directly to opening YouTube, a website/app that I hadn't made any effort to reduce the time I spent using it because I never saw it as a social platform for some reason, and to make things worse I actually saw it as being productive, after all I've learnt so much of what I know from videos on it....

I started watching more and more with each passing day, I even started playing videos in the background while I did other tasks and played games, without noticing this habit became an addiction, an addiction that was sapping away my concentration and will to work on other things and even play games that I loved, and the worst part is that even after I noticed that I couldn't focus on what I wanted to do with videos playing on the background I didn't stop watching them, I instead stopped making things and playing games to focus on watching videos because "it's productive".

By then I had already been paying for YouTube Premium for a while, and YouTube Premium has this nice page that shows you your "benefits with premium", that is, the time you spent using it, that is when I noticed that I had over 200 Hours of "Ad-free watch time" per month, that's over 6 hours a day! Considering that I wake at about 7AM, then work and go to sleep at about 11PM that left me with about 8:30 free time, of which 1 hour was commute, some time was eating and taking care of hygiene and over 6 watching videos that I wouldn't even remember about 15 minutes later.

So it was clear that I had to do something, I simply tried to use my willpower to resist mindlessly opening videos to keep my mind busy and it worked to an extent, but in the end was not very effective, I tried to set timers on my phone to limit how much I used it there but that was completely pointless because just before the timer runs out and locks me out off the app a notification pops up offering me "5 more minutes" and we all know how that goes. What ended up working the best, in January 2024, was just making YouTube very annoying to use, I uninstalled the apps on my devices, so that I could only access it through browsers, and installed a couple of extensions to make it annoying and more limited, LeechBlock NG (firefox add-on link) added a password to the website so that I had to actually think to access it and Unhook (firefox add-on link) that allowed me to hide all of the algorithmically fed content so that I would actually have to search for a video or go into each of my subscriptions channels to find something that I want to watch.

I ended up loosening those restrictions over the year, I removed LeechBlock and configured Unhook to redirect me into my subscription feed automatically (and even re-installed the YouTube app on some of my devices), and I ended up falling into some of those bad habits again, The worse by far being the urge to open a video on my second display when I'm doing something else. So I've been trying different things again to reduce that habit and none have worked at all.

Finally the task at hand

So I decided to take the entire month of January to just drill into my silly monkey brain that just because some activity produces the funny happy chemicals doesn't mean that it is an actually good activity, and to do so I have set up a couple of rules:

Only one task at a time,
No algorithmically fed content,
Background music is allowed,
No social media.

This is what I'm calling Distraction Free January you are welcome to join if you want, I intend turn this into an yearly tradition, to remind me that I'm the best version of me when I'm not distracted with pointless time-wasters.

If you want to follow along go ahead, these rules aren't exactly set in stone but if you decide to break them or use loopholes remember that you are only lying to yourself, I encourage you to really think about the rules and if you need some specific exception define it for yourself and stick to it to the end of the month (it would be unwise to not allow yourself to stream or post videos if that is a part of your income for example).

If I have anything else that I find worth of making a blog post during next month I will leave a little update of how this challenge is going on for me in the end, otherwise I will make a post summarizing how the challenge went for me, what wast good and what could have been better, so that next year I can improve it.

If you have any suggestions, be it about this challenge or anything really, consider sending them my way, my contacts are on the About page.

And that is about it for this post, month and year, I hope you had and keep having a nice festive time with your friends and family. I'll be back sometime 2025.