Chewing Gum

I wrote at the end of last year about doing some cleanup on my feeds. I had the new years break to try and get used to the various timeboxing plugins. To be honest, I have been having a hard time doing it well. I have that lingering habit to start typing in a website when I get a tingling of boredom. I found another person attempting this on Mastodon. They likened it to quiting smoking. I don’t know if it’s that tough or not (never smoked), but you definitely have to de-Pavlov yourself. I need some chewing gum to replace the cigarettes.

A few years ago, I found out that by unfollowing (not unfriending) all of my friends on facebook it would break the main feed. Only thing it showed was a “something went wrong” message. It was like this for several years, but they “fixed” it. Now it’s ads. Which is just as appealing as the broken page. I log in, check messages alerts from friends/family, log out, forget about facebook for a month or two, and repeat. This helped make it easy to shake off facebook.

When I did the initial setup during the new years break I allowed myself a few minutes of time on reddit, but with the news cycle back on the every-day-a-crisis with the US politics situation. I set my firefox plugin to limit the time to 0.001 minutes¹. By adding the timeboxing restrictions I started shifting my attention to where I continue to allow myself time. YouTube has been a big one. I was a bit annoyed with the suggestions so I started to experiment with deleting things in my watch history to see if that “undid” the suggestions. It does! But there’s also a pause history button. And a clear history button. Turns out that in the same vein as the following-no-one-on-facebook feed, YouTube’s home page just completely breaks down if you’re logged in and have watch history cleared and paused. It does not suggest any videos. It says if you want to see suggestions to unpause the history and watch videos. You can subscribe and see new videos in your subscription feed². I do not know if I am excited to keep this up. The discovery in youtube is sometimes rather good? It shows me new Taskmaster episodes without following them (they post way more videos than I want to subscribe to). I also enjoy finding various programming conference talks and learning new things from those. But as a strategy to deprogram myself, I like making the feed uninteresting more than timeboxing an addictive behavior³.

By making the feeds uninteresting and timeboxing, I want to trigger the boredom response. And I want that to redirect to anything that’s not these feeds. One of the problems is that my chewing gum strategy is different on weekends compared to the weekdays. On the weekend, it is very easy for me to hit the end of a timebox and write two blog posts. Or run to a cafe and read. But I can’t use the same flavor of gum on week nights. Mentally, I find it difficult to do much after work. Feeds and video content were very easy distractions previously. Do you have something you do to unwind? Do you have a favorite chewing gum?