[luddite99]

Some good practical tips here, thank you for your response. I've been reading through James Clear's Atomic Habits recently and one of his core ideas is that one should try to make good habits easy to do and bad habits hard to do. Convenience of technology has definitely become a double-edged sword in a lot of ways.

For me personally, HN is definitely a focus-stealer (I think I have at least 100 HN tabs open currently, that I really should just go and close). It's a tricky one, because I get a lot of value from it, but I guess that value is diminishing if I'm checking up on things every hour or so. I imagine those who've gone full cold-turkey on HN aren't here to comment, but I'll assume they've found benefit from that. Might have to start DNS blocking this one for a while and see what happens.

I did the friend unfollow trick on Facebook a few years back now, and definitely noticed the happiness benefits straight away, but still often catch myself clicking through random profiles when I do have to travel there.

To your point on convenience, I'm often frustrated by how easy it is to type 'yc' or 'fa' into the search bar in a moment of weakness, and then go down the rabbit-hole of distraction for hours. Obviously, a responsive search bar is an immensely useful feature for a web browser to have but this convenience does often make it easier to do something that is not in one's overall interest.