The main reason I joined Beeminder is to cut down on internet use during work hours. I set a Do-Less goal of 10 min/day. While my overall internet use has most likely decreased since I started Beeminding, I’ve derailed multiple times: 9x in under 2 months. My average internet use/day over this whole time is about 30 min/day.
It’s time to consider a different strategy, one that helps me bring my internet use per workday down to 10 min or less on more days. I’m considering the following:
Scrap this goal and start over: this time, start off by giving myself more than 10 min/day, maybe 25 min, and lower it gradually. For e.g., Reduce it by 5 min every week until it’s down to 10 min.
Give myself some bonus time every week if I DON’T derail (the opposite of a post-derail respite → a NO-derail bonus). The downside of this is I’d be giving myself the thing I want to avoid as a reward.
NO post-detail respite. This feature has been completely pointless for me. There’s no incentive not to use it all, so I end up spending even MORE time online after I’ve derailed.
What do you all think, and does anyone have any other suggestions of things that may have worked for you?
Step 1: Track how often you end up distracting sites. You can use something like Rescuetime for or Toggle for this.
Step 2: Cut that amount by half and that is the amount of time that you can spend on distracting sites during the workday. Do this for like 3 months and then cut that number in half and so on.
For example let’s say that you spend 4 hours a workday on distracting sites cut that to 2 hours.
I tend to believe in a very incremental approach to behavior change because it is nearly impossible to make drastic changes actually stick. The plan above ensures that you are not too aggressive as you make the change to become more productive.
Hi! Yup, this is similar to what I proposed above. Since I currently spend 30 min/day, I suggested making the Do-Less goal 20 min and then lowering it to 15 min, and so on. I suppose the main difference in your idea is to lower the target every few months instead of every week. Hmm… interesting.
post-derail respite definitely doesn’t make sense for all goals! i do have the standard 7 days on most of my goals, but i had goals with 0 post-derail respite on purpose, and i might have one or two where it’s set to 3 days or so.
if you think it hinders your goal, definitely get rid of it! you’ll see how it ends up working, and you can always add more/any post-derail respite if getting rid of it didn’t help you.
i also agree with @cgamer1 that you should definitely at least wait a few weeks before lowering the amount of the gradual step-down! one week is so short! it’s not really representative. you might have a really great week and feel really on top of it, and then the next week a few bad things pile up and you’ll feel worse for not keeping up with the even stricter commitment you’ve set yourself. maybe start by stepping down the goal after one month?
additionally, if you don’t have premium, your changes can only take effect one week after you’ve made them, anyway. so giving you some extra time to adjust to them might be wise. (don’t know if this applies to you, but felt worth mentioning either way.)
This is a good idea. The one benefit of the respite is that it’s nice to have a buffer. But the “bonus time” I proposed above would serve the same purpose. And I prefer to earn a buffer for good behavior, so to speak, instead of simply getting a buffer for no good reason when I derail.
Since two people have suggested this, I’ll do increments of at least a month or more instead of just a week. I thought a week would be enough, but it is easy to overestimate one’s ability to change.
And yes, I don’t have premium, so you’re right that I would need to wait at least two weeks, in any case.
What’s been your failure mode? Are you aware when you’re about to derail and continue anyway? Or is it automatic browsing and you only realize later that you’ve derailed?
First, I should make clear that all this internet use I’m talking about takes place on my work computer. My phone is not an issue (at least at the moment).
Most of the time I’ve derailed it’s because I simply forgot that I’m dangerously close to derailing, and opened a new browser tab for “just 5 mins” of recreational internet use (sometimes because I have a few minutes to kill, sometimes because I’m super stressed and mentally-tired). It’s a deep-set, automatic habit. I seem to reach for the internet like an alcoholic reaches for a drink (this may be an extreme analogy, but it’s not too far off the mark). Bored? Internet. Tired/stressed? Internet. Need to decompress? Internet.
So I’ve tried putting my computer in airplane mode, but I invariably end up needing to go back online to send work emails or do other work-related tasks. I would try batching my work-related internet use but it’s not always possible. One major reason I keep going back online is Google Calendar - I use it extensively to plan my workweek and the offline mode doesn’t allow edits (which is kind of a pointless offline mode, if you ask me). So I turn off airplane mode to make changes to my work schedule on Google Calendar, but if I don’t remember to go back in airplane mode, there’s a good chance that at some point I’ll forget to not use the internet for recreational use.
What HAS been helpful is the StayFocused Chrome extension. I’ve used it to block all the usual time-wasting culprits. And it’ll count down the time when I get close to 10 min being up. But I still sometimes have to fight the urge to disable the extension so I can use the internet some more. And sometimes I end up giving in. Hence, Beeminder.
Interesting. I’ve definitely had similar issues in the past, where I’d end up on Facebook or YouTube or something and not even remember going there. It was just so ingrained as muscle memory.
One plugin that helped me personally a lot with that is this one. It doesn’t block the sites (so I wouldn’t get frustrated with the plugin and delete it), but just make me wait a few seconds before the site would load. I found that usually I’d think, “oh, wait, I didn’t mean to go to youtube!” and just close the tab.
Though a big part of my problem was undiagnosed ADHD. So I was fatigued / having really bad symptoms and the way I’d cope was by going to a distracting website since I couldn’t focus on work. Now that my ADHD is better treated, it’s a lot less of an issue. And I allow myself some amount of distraction when I’m first getting started on a task, since I know it can take several attempts before the job “takes” and I get interested in what I should actually be doing.
Everyone, premium or not, who changes their goal with the commitment dial has the change take effect a week later. The Bee Plus plan includes the old advanced graph editor, which does allow you to make a goal harder (but not easier) within the one-week akrasia horizon—but everyone has access to the new graph editor found at graph.beeminder.com. (Which eventually will be integrated into the goal page to replace the old graph editor, and at that point may be locked behind a premium plan or maybe not.)
What this means is that premium or no, you can shape your graph as you like, subject only to the restriction of the akrasia horizon: no making your goal easier in the upcoming week.
I tried out this app or a similar one recently, and didn’t like that there was no option to skip the wait if I was within my 10-min daily limit. So I stopped using it. But, I guess the idea is to reduce overall internet use generally, which includes when I have some internet time left for the day. And I realize that “I have time left, so I can browse for a couple mins” is exactly the type of thought process that gets me in trouble. So maybe I’ll give this app another try. Thanks for the rec!
This is a good point as well. I just increased my medication dose and am also taking other therapeutic steps, so hopefully all that will help with this too.
As I wrote in the OP, even though I’ve derailed a bunch of times, my overall recreational internet use at work has absolutely gone down after I started Beeminding. There certainly has been an improvement. An expensive one, but a necessary one. Now the challenge is to keep this up and hopefully gradually reduce derailments over time.
So here’s a summary of my revised strategy going forward based on responses in this thread:
Scrap (i.e. archive) this goal and start over: this time, start off by giving myself more than 10 min/day, maybe 25 min, and lower it gradually. For e.g., Reduce it by 5 min every month until it’s down to 10 min.
NO post-detail respite. This feature has been completely pointless for me. There’s no incentive not to use it all, so I end up spending even MORE time online after I’ve derailed.
Give myself some bonus time every week if I DON’T derail (the opposite of a post-derail respite → a NO-derail bonus). The only downside of this is I’d be giving myself the thing I want to avoid as a reward. I’m on the fence about this one because it increases my weekly internet use in successful weeks. Perhaps instead of a reward every successful week, I could give myself a freebie on randomly-picked weeks. The akrasia horizon is helpful for this because it makes it so that I can only add on more minutes for at least a week later, and so can’t (mis)use this to get immediate gratification.
Along with StayFocused, start using a Chrome extension like Mindful Internet. The purpose of this is to try to break or at least weaken the habit of automatic internet browsing.
Speaking of breaking habits, I’ve read that the best way to break a bad/unhealthy habit is to replace it with a good/harmless habit. I’m curious if anyone has successfully lowered their automatic, aimless internet browsing by replacing it with a habit like, say, taking a walk around the office/apartment when you’re bored/stressed/tired. I’d love to hear about it!
You could set a very long Cold Turkey block with a 10 minute Allowance. Or instead of airplane mode, you could use Cold Turkey micromanager to allow only offline work + email?
