Note: The strategy described at the end of this essay didn't work.It would work for a while, and then I'd gradually find myselfusing the Internet on my work computer. I'm trying otherstrategies now, but I think this time I'll wait till I'm surethey work before writing about them.May 2008Procrastination feeds on distractions. Most people find ituncomfortable just to sit and do nothing; you avoid work by doingsomething else.So one way to beat procrastination is to starve it of distractions.But that's not as straightforward as it sounds, because there arepeople working hard to distract you. Distraction is not a staticobstacle that you avoid like you might avoid a rock in the road.Distraction seeks you out.Chesterfield described dirt as matter out of place. Distractingis, similarly, desirable at the wrong time. And technology iscontinually being refined to produce more and more desirable things.Which means that as we learn to avoid one class of distractions,new ones constantly appear, like drug-resistant bacteria.Television, for example, has after 50 years of refinement reachedthe point where it's like visual crack. I realized when I was 13that TV was addictive, so I stopped watching it. But I read recently that the average American watches 4 hours of TV a day. A quarterof their life.TV is in decline now, but only because people have found even moreaddictive ways of wasting time. And what's especially dangerousis that many happen at your computer. This is no accident. Anever larger percentage of office workers sit in front of computersconnected to the Internet, and distractions always evolve towardthe procrastinators.I remember when computers were, for me at least, exclusively forwork. I might occasionally dial up a server to get mail or ftpfiles, but most of the time I was offline. All I could do was writeand program. Now I feel as if someone snuck a television onto mydesk. Terribly addictive things are just a click away. Run intoan obstacle in what you're working on? Hmm, I wonder what's newonline. Better check.After years of carefully avoiding classic time sinks like TV, games,and Usenet, I still managed to fall prey to distraction, becauseI didn't realize that it evolves. Something that used to be safe,using the Internet, gradually became more and more dangerous. Somedays I'd wake up, get a cup of tea and check the news, then checkemail, then check the news again, then answer a few emails, thensuddenly notice it was almost lunchtime and I hadn't gotten any realwork done. And this started to happen more and more often.It took me surprisingly long to realize how distracting the Internethad become, because the problem was intermittent. I ignored it theway you let yourself ignore a bug that only appears intermittently. WhenI was in the middle of a project, distractions weren't really aproblem. It was when I'd finished one project and was decidingwhat to do next that they always bit me.Another reason it was hard to notice the danger of this new typeof distraction was that social customs hadn't yet caught up withit. If I'd spent a whole morning sitting on a sofa watching TV,I'd have noticed very quickly. That's a known danger sign, likedrinking alone. But using the Internet still looked and felt a lot like work.Eventually, though, it became clear that the Internet had become so muchmore distracting that I had to start treating it differently.Basically, I had to add a new application to my list of known timesinks: Firefox. *The problem is a hard one to solve because most people still needthe Internet for some things. If you drink too much, you can solvethat problem by stopping entirely. But you can't solve the problemof overeating by stopping eating. I couldn't simply avoid the Internet entirely, as I'd done with previous time sinks.At first I tried rules. For example, I'd tell myself I was onlygoing to use the Internet twice a day. But these schemes neverworked for long. Eventually something would come up that requiredme to use it more than that. And then I'd gradually slip backinto my old ways.Addictive things have to be treated as if they were sentientadversaries—as if there were a little man in your head alwayscooking up the most plausible arguments for doing whatever you'retrying to stop doing. If you leave a path to it, he'll find it.The key seems to be visibility. The biggest ingredient in most bad habitsis denial. So you have to make it so that you can't merely slipinto doing the thing you're trying to avoid. It has to set offalarms.Maybe in the long term the right answer for dealing with Internetdistractions will be software that watches and controls them. Butin the meantime I've found a more drastic solution that definitelyworks: to set up a separate computer for using the Internet.I now leave wifi turned off on my main computer except when I needto transfer a file or edit a web page, and I have a separate laptop on the other sideof the room that I use to check mail or browse the web. (Irony ofironies, it's the computer Steve Huffman wrote Reddit on. WhenSteve and Alexis auctioned off their old laptops for charity, Ibought them for the Y Combinator museum.)My rule is that I can spend as much time online as I want, as longas I do it on that computer. And this turns out to be enough. WhenI have to sit on the other side of the room to check email or browsethe web, I become much more aware of it. Sufficiently aware, inmy case at least, that it's hard to spend more than about an houra day online.And my main computer is now freed for work. If you try this trick,you'll probably be struck by how different it feels when yourcomputer is disconnected from the Internet. It was alarming to mehow foreign it felt to sit in front of a computer that couldonly be used for work, because that showed how much time I musthave been wasting.Wow. All I can do at this computer is work. Ok, I better workthen.That's the good part. Your old bad habits now help you to work.You're used to sitting in front of that computer for hours at atime. But you can't browse the web or check email now. What areyou going to do? You can't just sit there. So you start working.
