I’m sure distraction in general is pretty well-covered territory on this forum, but maybe this one tactic I use is novel. I have a do-less goal that is meant to measure, by time, a few doomscrollyesque phone activities that I’d like to discourage.
I don’t have any automated data entry – I use the android timer (and I find that just the overhead of starting & stopping the timer is itself a nice disincentive). At some point it occurred to me that in addition to discouraging absolute time spent, it’s also nice to disincentivize mindlessly pulling out the phone as a distraction, and one way to do that is to have a minimum quantity for data points. In my case I’ve been using five minutes – so I’m not going to bother reading news/etc unless I actually want to do it enough to do it for at least five minutes.
This restriction doesn’t pair well with the android timer though, and so I’ve automated it by using a webhook to edit new datapoints to round them up to 5 minutes.
I imagine you could get a similar effect by having a second do-less goal that just counts the datapoints added to the first one, using metaminder (it can do that, right? I don’t actually know).
Anyhow, that’s all. I’ve been using this for years now, and find it works well for me.