After years of trying various methods, I broke this habit by pitting my impatience against my laziness. I decoupled the action and the neurological reward by setting up a simple 30-second delay I had to wait through, in which I couldn't do anything else, before any new page or chat client would load (and only allowed one to run at once). The urge to check all those sites magically vanished–and my 'productive' computer use was unaffected.
![[[reddit page]] Luke (thinking): I shouldn't be looking at Reddit. Why can't I stop? [[CNN page]] Luke (thinking): Refreshing CNN again. Do news stories so affect my life that I benefit from checking them more than once a day? [[shutdown screen]] Luke (thinking): I should at least check Faceb... no. Screw it. I can't do my job when I'm distracting myself every five minutes like this. [[two people before a battlefield screen]] Guy: His computer's off. Luke - You've switched off your targeting computer. What's wrong? Luke: Nothing. I'm all right.](https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/let_go.png "After years of trying various methods, I broke this habit by pitting my impatience against my laziness. I decoupled the action and the neurological reward by setting up a simple 30-second delay I had to wait through, in which I couldn't do anything else, before any new page or chat client would load (and only allowed one to run at once). The urge to check all those sites magically vanished--and my 'productive' computer use was unaffected.")