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>It came to a point (for HN and RSS readers) where I would check articles every hour. It culminated with me mindlessly clicking article links, reading the title
by KVFinn 9y ago
>It came to a point (for HN and RSS readers) where I would check articles every hour. It culminated with me mindlessly clicking article links, reading the title, scrolling through it (not reading), just familiarizing myself with single words passing through my hyper short attention-span, and getting a "feel" for what the article looked like. It was quite a scary when I did this one time for 30 minutes not remembering anything I have "read" whatsoever.
Not specifically about phones, but I have my router only allow access to sites like that for certain hours in the day. I can always log into the router to turn it off, but adding that extra bit of friction is usually enough to get me to check it later during the designated times.
- soupflavor 9y agoOooh this is amazing. Have any writeups on how you've accomplished this? Thanks
- mod 9y agoYou could use a hosts file and a cron job, perhaps, for something similar. Or do what I do, and just edit the hosts file manually. That means I often go for days without changing it, because it forces me to make a decision, rather than act on impulse.
- unicornporn 9y ago> but I have my router only allow access to sites like that for certain hours in the day My router can do this, but not for sites using SSL (that is, just about every respectable site out there, these days). Do you filter IPs and not by domain?
- KVFinn 9y ago>My router can do this, but not for sites using SSL (that is, just about every respectable site out there, these days). Do you filter IPs and not by domain? Yeah it's a pain to do it right. I'm just doing it with a local DNS server for the moment. I've considered setting up a local Raspberry Pi for both PiHole to block ads, and running Squid or whatever on it to provide better SSL filtering. If there a nice writeup for how to do this I would also be interested. When I am working on a single computer away from home I sometimes just manually edit my hosts file. Crude but it still catches me a bunch of times over the day where I almost unconsciously pop up a distracting site.
- nicky0 9y agoMy Draytek Vigor router can filter SSL sites by keywords in domain. It results in an ugly SSL error (bad certificate) when the filter is active, but it fits the job.
- radix07 9y agoLeech Block for Firefox or Chrome Nanny on Chrome do a great job of keeping me from veering too far off my intended path without too much configuration... Just setup domains and the times or limits you want to restrict them.