Time
In my own efforts toward "Should We, Therefore, Destroy the Client", I am starting to get some good results. I finally blocked YouTube and Twitter using Freedom https://freedom.to/. I paid for a lifetime membership to Freedom when they offered it for $60. I have at times paid for RescueTime https://www.rescuetime.com/ and Beeminder https://www.beeminder.com/home as well but I am using the free versions now.
A big motivation for blocking YouTube and Twitter came when I decided to pre-order the Light Phone III https://www.thelightphone.com/lightiii. This decision came after listening during the New Polity Conference, "Should We, Therefore, Destroy the Servers", to Andrew Willard Jones describe how his own children do not ask for a smartphone and Jacob Imam followed up explaining about how this comes from Andrew and Sara's good example. Since I pre-ordered it, I knew I needed to start cutting back on the time spent on my current smartphone if I am going to successfully transition to the Light Phone.
Here is how my system works. As mentioned above, I block YouTube and Twitter using Freedom. I also track all my time on all my devices using RescueTime. My data from RescueTime gets atomatically sent via an integration to Beeminder. I manually export the data from Beeminder and copy paste it into Google Sheets but I have also finally setup an IFTTT https://ifttt.com/explore integration to automate it following these instructions: http://www.markwk.com/data-processing-time-tracking.html.
As you can see from these charts, I have successfully transitioned from an average of 4 hours of entertainment to less than 1 hour.
Almost everything counts as entertainment. YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, all news, browsing my own photos, etc. I do control what counts and does not count through RescueTime. For example, right now I am not counting Discord as entertainment but I have in the past and I will again in the future. Counting everything helps me avoid switching from one time wasting thing to another. I have a long track record of doing that. I have cut back on Facebook (back when that was a temptation) and found I had simply transferred my time to YouTube.
Another notable exception that currently does not count as entertainment is my podcasting app, Pocket Casts. I have been experimenting on cutting back on podcasts but since the Light Phone has a podcasting app, I am not trying to stop at this point.
RescueTime is very good for controlling what counts as entertainment because it comes with a huge list of sites and apps that count by default. Also, it allows you to add or remove individual sites and apps, from each category. It has a very robust system for categories and subcategories, like "Software Dev : General", "Comm/Schedule : Email", and "Design/Comp. : Writing". Then, from that, you can control how much each category and subcategory counts as Very Productive, Productive, Neutral, Distracting, or Very Distracting. It streamlines time tracking an enormous amount.
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