Today, I’ll be starting on the challenge I laid out last week, and to do so I’ll need to put in place some technical safeguards to keep me on track. I’ll be augmenting my self control primarily via focus mode on my phone, browser extensions, and making sure that I have a full to-do list of both recreational activities and side projects.

Phone

Eliminating time spent scrolling on my phone is really the lowest-hanginging fruit of this entire challenge. I’ve already mostly migrated away from dedicated mobile apps, so I’ll mostly be using the same browser extensions on Firefox mobile as I am on desktop. However, I do use Tusky for Mastodon, so I will be setting up a screen time limit of 30 minutes per day, and hiding every tab besides my subscription feed. I’ll also disable notifications for everything besides direct messages.

Browser

This is where the fun begins. For me, spending a week off grid would be taking this challenge on easy mode. If something interrupts the normal flow of my life, such as a trip or an old friend staying with me, I can ignore pretty much all of the electronic distractions in my life for a while and focus on the novelty of it all. That’s not what this challenge is about, though. I want to change my habits long-term, and for obvious reasons, never using a computer again is just not an option for me.

So, what I really need to do is strike a balance between my browser being useful to me and sucking away all my free time. Eventually, I’ll have to develop some self control. However, until I get there, I’ll need some browser extennsions to help me:

  • LeechBlock NG - This one is the heavy hitter. I’m going to use it to restrict my access to a huge variety of sites, and limit the total time I can spend on sites that I consider necessary, like YouTube and Reddit.

  • Unhook - This one will prevent me from using YouTube to do anything but search for specific videos.

  • Reddit Liberation - This one will allow me to read Reddit comments from Google searches while preventing me from getting sucked into my feed. It’s actually Chrome only, so making it work on Firefox will be one of my first tasks for this week. Until it works, I’ll totally block Reddit with LeechBlock.

I’ll also be making a conscious effort to only check my email when I actually need to. Sometimes I find scrolling through my junk mail becomes my last-resort content fix when I try to quit social media, so I’ll make it a bit easier to just not do that by cleaning out my inbox now and trying to unsubscribe / block as many mailing lists as I can.

To-Do list

  • (As mentioned above) Make Reddit Liberation work on Firefox, and possible add a few minor improvements.

  • Get good at 5D Chess With Multiverse Time Travel.

  • Finish A Crown of Swords by Robert Jordan.

  • Write a short story.