What are some things you can do on the computer to help yourself get off the computer?
i.e. How can you “bootstrap” your own motivation? This question is key not just for breaking away from internet distractions, but also for getting up in the morning and doing other things you’d like to do but have trouble finding motivation for in the moment.
One thing you can do is set an alarm.
Or put on a motivational video, such as a yoga video or other fitness video.
The reason these activities may be easy to do is they fit in the addicted groove.
What’s the “addicted groove”? It’s the set of things that my body and brain are naturally inclined to do, not because I want to do them, but because of my internet addiction (for lack of a better term). They’re the muscle memory components of my addiction. Things like opening YouTube or Twitter or Facebook. cmd+t f enter.
Putting on a YouTube video is super easy because it uses these same actions that I accidentally do mindlessly.
So if I can take advantage of these automatic actions to get myself doing something I want to be doing, like exercising, getting ready for work, reading a book, going to sleep, doing a math problem, etc… then that’s a win.
Putting on videos is one approach.
Talking with an AI (or another human, but that might be higher activation energy) could be another approach. In both of these cases we’re injecting entropy, but that’s also the case for just mindlessly scrolling on twitter/facebook etc, so the entropy isn’t the key ingredient.
We want to inject deliberately useful information, just not information I already possessed. Although… writing is a good approach too, and that is clearly producing information I already possessed, but I am disentangling it in the process of writing.
I wish I had a better mathematical understanding of what that disentangling really was. It’s a critical component to understanding neural networks. That is a topic for another snippet though.
Summarizing here, the ideas we found so far are:
- Leverage the addicted grove (e.g. play a YouTube video that will wake you up or inspire you to stop playing YouTube Videos)
- Use small/easier actions to start (e.g. putting on one sock can soon turn into getting dressed / starting an alarm can lead to a helpful trigger later on)
- Set up triggers (e.g. an alarm or text message can jolt you into action)
- Inject entropy (talking to an AI or human can be a good source of entropy)