You decide to check your Youtube subscriptions, then Twitter, then your favorite forum/s then you spend the next several hours switching between them and next thing you know it’s 2:00 PM. Eventually, you’re not even really watching videos or reading posts, your eyes have totally glazed over.
How do you avoid doing this and make the most out of the rest of your day, or just not fall in the trap in the first place? Asking for, ummmm, a friend. Yeah, a friend.
Jokes aside, also would love to hear how people manage this. For me, it’s building a routine for days off—when to eat, what things I want to get done, laying out some goals, etc. Especially mapping out what I want to do for fun and treating that the same way I’d treat something I have to work on. But it often doesn’t work that well.
For starters I’m never awake before 9. Your friend is starting their day way too early. Secondly, have a list of chores that need doing so that your friend has to walk away from the computer. Water the plants/garden, feed the fish, dishes, laundry, mow grass, etc. Thirdly, add a long password to your friend’s phone so that it is inconvenient to check it every 5 seconds.
This is something I run into on most mornings, it takes a lot of browsing and “just one more” video watching before I’ll work up the nerve to get out of bed. One part of this that doesn’t help is if I’ve got a number of things before I need to do right away in the mornings, washing dishes to make breakfast, taking laundry out of the dryer, etc.
My recommendations would be:
Set an alarm a fair distance away from the bed, enough to require standing up to go turn it off
Make sure anything that can be done the night before, is already done
Unless you’re like me and have a cat that demands to be fed first thing in the morning, force yourself into the shower before anything else, the hot water helps for fully waking up
Getting into exercise helps a lot. It’s not particularly easy to get into working out, but once you do it becomes a pretty powerful habit, at least in my experience. Exercise is also pretty good at shaking me out of the sort of twitter/youtube malaise you are describing and even if I fall back into it after going to the gym I still feel like I accomplished something for the day.
The gym is also a great place to catch up on music or podcasts you want to listen to. I save a lot of my favorite podcast for the gym so it serves as an extra motivation to go. Every episode of Lore Reasons I’ve listened to has been at the gym. I might have to stop doing that since I nearly burst out laughing in the middle of a bench press last time and that felt pretty dangerous.
I was a internet savvy person, i do wake up early in the morning but i start watching Netflix and spends a lot of time on social media and on other sites. Once i get fed up with my daily routine and decided not to use cell phone/laptop more than 1 hour. So I started doing exercise in early morning & house works like washing the dishes, cleaning the house, making break fast, lunch dinner. I try my level best to keep my self busy in other activities to avoid using internet. Now I only use smartphone / laptop to check the current affairs, and online coupons code for shopping.
This thread gave me a good chuckle after getting home from an 11hr work day and chasing 2yr old around the house to get her fed, washed and in bed.
Don’t beat yourselves up too much, one day you’ll have a busy job, be raising a child and renovating a house and you’ll look back fondly at the time you used waste on the internet
Definitely make todo lists (doesn’t really matter if you complete them, they’re just for you, but it gives you ideas of things you could do instead of surf social media forever). For example, Basically whenever I have an idea of a project/thing I would like to do (set up a personal VPN, migrate my email off of gmail, go through a tutorial for xyz thing), I add it to a trello board. I set that as my homepage, and whenever I open my browser I see all the things I’ve planned to do, and either break it down further depending on the time I have, at that moment, or I go ahead and do one if it’s fairly low effort and I don’t have a lot of time at the moment.
I also use instapaper for articles and stuff and try to only actually read stuff from that. It has a nice feature that lets you sort articles by average read time, so if you have less than 5 minutes you can find something you’ve bookmarked that will take that amount of time.
I’ve been pretty bad about losing hours of my day to websites that are effectively a waste of time and energy.
My secret for getting out of the habit is to just drop them. I’m off social media now and it’s great.
Of course that’s not as easy as it sounds. If it’s become part of your routine then some more extreme actions may be required.
In my case I installed some website blockers on my computer and phone. It blocked access to websites during certain times and encouraged me to get more work done.
OF COURSE, a lot of these blockers you can just turn off on a whim and get your access back, so it’s up to you to really want it.
Basically it was a game of finding what I was wasting the most time on and finding ways to at least remind myself I shouldn’t be wasting more time on it. Even if it was at least something I had to press a button to turn off. It was still an act I recognized as a personal failure until I just kept them on and eventually stopped needing them entirely.
This was what worked for me. It took a while for me to get in the habit of not just turning it off when I wanted to look at a particular site or whatever, but I eventually got it down and I’m much more focused these days.
Although, suddenly I’m finding myself working from home, which has brought with it a whole slew of new distractions. But at least I don’t have to worry about those distractions on top of the ones I already worried about.
But seriously, social media is bad and you should get off it. I do not feel I’ve lost much by removing it from my life.
