Addictive things have to be treated as if they were sentient
adversaries—as if there were a little man in your head always
cooking up the most plausible arguments for doing whatever you're
trying to stop doing. If you leave a path to it, he'll find it.The key seems to be visibility. The biggest ingredient in most bad habits
is denial. So you have to make it so that you can't merely slip
into doing the thing you're trying to avoid. It has to set off
alarms.Maybe in the long term the right answer for dealing with Internet
distractions will be
software that watches and controls them. But
in the meantime I've found a more drastic solution that definitely
works: to set up a separate computer for using the Internet.
