Ask HN: How do you fight YouTube addiction and procrastination? I'm struggling
My current daily routine looks like this:
- 8:00~9:00 – Getting ready for work
- 9:00–13:00 – Work
- 13:00–14:00 – Lunch + YouTube
- 14:00–18:00 – Work
- 18:00–20:00 – Break from work + Dinner + YouTube
- 20:00~1:00 – YouTube, gaming, occasional events, personal projects, or sports. Lately, I’ve noticed my screen time during this period has increased a lot, and I’ve been feeling lazy to do anything productive—mostly just doomscrolling or watching videos
What’s your routine like? How do you manage your time, maintain social connections, avoid digital distractions, and stay on track with your goals and learning?
109 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 83.4 ms ] threadThat's a nice balance for me - it leaves more options than completely blocking it but it protects me from being bounced around by the algorithm.
The recipe is, and has always been, to delay gratification. Duty comes first.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KozkP0mHjQ
Here's a test for you.
If I were to offer you $10 million to do anything you want during your day, what would you do? Would you accept the money? Of course you would.
What if the consequence of accepting was that you don't wake up tomorrow morning? Obviously you say no. But you just found out waking up in the morning is worth more than $10 million.
Before you begin, take some time to outline the tasks you need to complete. Now when you return to the home office, you are only there for one reason.
If problems persist, you may need to find more interesting projects.
(2) Wipe history and only watch productive topics on your account. Watch all other videos on incognito - I set up violentmonkey scripts to help. Here's a cool secret: your feed will ONLY be related to the videos in your history. My feed is now ONLY ML and music
(3) Delete the app on the phone. Only use youtube through firefox (if you have android) which allows the ublock extension
(4) Alternatives like newpipe helped before I stumbled onto this solution
You still need a little willpower. Find the strength to not use youtube for 3 weeks. Then it becomes much easier
Edit: clarity
I'm finding the blank youtube page incredibly soothing already!
https://www.rxjourney.net/how-to-be-more-productive
I know how I sound, but... For me it's the only approach possible. I cannot moderate myself. The only way for me is to quit cold turkey.
For many websites, I had to attempt this many times because I would fail. But I don't see any other way.
What it comes down to is not having belief in what you do, so you do other things. You might feel trapped, so you pass the time with stuff like YouTube because that is the most compelling thing available to you. A man will walk on broken glass with a smile if he truly believes in what it will accomplish.
When I was younger, I was into video games because they gave me a sense of accomplishment and progress compared to high school, which I found relatively meaningless. I called it progress quest.
When there is a rare game or youtube topic that really obsessively catches your attention, like Factorio, pay attention to it! It helps show you what drives you, and you can try to leverage that into things you find healthier.
Also, it might be worth it to look into ADHD testing if this has been a persistent pattern your entire life.
When you look at life, ask yourself what brings you most joy in life, what makes you feel most alive, find your direction, and avoid the petty traps designed to enslave you.
Find your discipline, challenge yourself, and find like-minded people without your phone as a filter. The cost of social connection increases exponentially with malign influences as it becomes digital. Learn the education and related skills of discernment which have been purposefully withheld from recent generations. Seek and base your actions on actual truth, not rhetoric.
The first step is recognition of the compulsion traps that have been set for you to enslave you to addiction.
Read a book, Robert Cialdini's "Influence", and you will begin to recognize the subtle factors in your own psychology that allow others to manipulate you towards detrimental ends without your knowledge.
Learn about what specifically defines torture, so you can recognize and eliminate such torturous and vexatious things from your life as intolerable.
Most of the things people have been brought up to believe today are true only in the narrowest of respects, and in a broader perspective are lies of omission, designed to blind you.
Evil didn't stop existing, people were just induced to willfully choose to be blind to it with carefully crafted convincing lies, and technique, and systematic indirect interference to tie you down leaving you without agency.
Reclaim your cultural heritage whatever culture that may be, and prepare yourself for the dark times that are ahead, which may move slowly but are coming.
Without joy, partnership, children, a future, there is nothing. If you aren't moving forward towards that, you are moving backward.
To help me disconnect, I set my phone to turn on power saving, grayscale, dark mode, and max redshift after 11 PM. It makes it so annoying to use that I can just put it down.
Don't worry too much about being unproductive outside working hours. Worry about unhealthy habits that will eventually harm your productivity.
Going outside facilitates this
At a certain point you need to accept that you will not be able to willpower your way out of it. You need systems and strategies in place that cut you off from your addiction.
That can look like a lot of things that I'm not going to try to stuff into an HN comment but here's what works for me:
- Leaving the house with a dumb phone. I recommend using an old smartphone that is meticulously stripped away from bad things over purchasing a flip phone. You're eventually going to need to call up an uber, scan a QR code, and other such smartphoney things you need a dumb phone to do. Leaving your environment is also key. If you must, bring your actual phone with you, but fully powered off.
- Using a feature on your phone to cut yourself off from YouTube on a scheduled basis. Most phones have something like this by default, but there are also some third party apps that take it a step further.
- Have something you enjoy to take the place of YouTube. Entertainment is healthy to an extent. Taken too far, it becomes a distraction from cognitive processes you need to be regularly engaging in, to say the least.
Also it is true that these things with procrastination and addictive behaviors are very much emotional issues and so on... and in my case whenever I notice that I'm avoiding dealing with my emotions and the hard stuff with YouTube content black holes I do the resets.
Good luck