I tend to call this idling and it has been something that has been known to consume hours and hours of the day, to an extreme example where it just goes ahead and consume the day.

At first I tried many methods to fight, including and alarm set when I start idling, or having a dedicated time to idle usually 15mins.

But then I noticed that I just kind of slip into idling so the next idea was to keep a sort of a log that I fil up before i tend to do something or a series of actions and the approx time it took.

This had worked much better than the previos ideas so I kept at it trying to form a habit out of it in the same light of whats is my next action step from GTD.

But it would still occur from time to time and sometimes it would be an outbreak of idleness.

So instead of trying to fix it I start to do two things, one is to try and be as conscious as I can while idling and the other is to just observr my self and my patterns of idling to try and see the why I wanted to do it over something like play a video game or you know, have some fun.

What I found out ( and this is still a work in progres) is that my idlenes is a mix of an eacape, being overwhelmed, a habit comforting reflex, dopamine fix need and being tired.

It is rarely one reason for it so I understood that I am unable to fix it just by doing one thing.

So I started to adress the problems one by one depending on the current strongerst reason for. If tired go nap for 9m30s, if overwhelmed clean up gtd and add new stuff to inbox etc.

I still idle but it is not as long as it was. Also not having the apps helps allot. Strangely enough this place is not what I use for idle, but that is because I've been treating it differently from the get go, as most of the time each topic here that interests me is packed with information and has a buch of really high quality comments so much so that I usuallly just add a topic in my gtd for further processing.

One observation for idling is that you should not combine idling with something you enjoy as idling is a habit loop and everything you add to it feeds it, now this can be used for good as well but idling while you drink coffe or are having fun will chain that strongly.

If you are able to be counscious enough to catch yourself as you begin to idle that is the most difficult but most useful step as for me most of the time idling is an semi-conscious act.

Guided meditation helps here, also having coinscious triggers either formed ( everytime you sit a moment of consciousness) or randomly activated ( set a random gentle alarm trough out the day) the more you have those the bigger the chance that it will trigger when you start to idle.

Also as said before, observe your idle patterns, your body position when you start doing it, your place in the room or wherever while it is hard to build consciousness triggers on idling itself you may be able to build it around the movement or positional patterns that you take when idling.

The reason I am motivated to write this is that I noticed just how much of the time that I will never going to get back is taken by it with no visible when done in the quantity that I have been doing it.

There is obviously some benefit though, but same can be said for many other addicting substances.

Also calling it idling is kind of not fair because true idling ( just doing nothing) is actually very useful as it help you rest and kind of process things and resting or true idling before I go to bed has improved my sleep quality.

And that is all on that from me, maybe it might be useful to someone.

user:	boxfoxdox1
created:	November 11, 2021
karma:	15