Hey guys, I'm back. My thoughts on the process are below:
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TL:DR - For me, the blackout was at first painful, but eventually started to become productive. Had a moment of clarity surrounding why particular types of surfing are problematic for me.
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The first few days after starting the blackout it really startled my routine. And I wasn't happy about it. One of the behavior patterns that I noticed was that I would surf the web whenever I had small chunks of time I needed to kill. For example I have a few minutes available before I go do something, I immediately hop on the web. This seemed to happen a lot right before going to bed too. I was downright grumpy when I would try to hit reddit and my DNS blocker caught me and throws up the access denied.
With enough time, I became less grumpy about this and more accepting of my new "blackout" state. I had some natural distractions life threw my way, and also some projects I did on my to distract myself from the habit.
* My brother was in the hospital for almost the entire second half of august - so I was there visiting constantly. (he is out and doing better now). Spending time with family in the hospital makes you realize how trivial a lot of the other stuff is.
* I worked on preparation for my move (this weekend).
* I worked on two different software projects in my spare time for fun, one of which I think helps me to be more productive at work.
* I did some reading (one fiction book, and some reading in the MMM august book club book). I hardly ever read for fun... so this is a big change.
* I went to bed earlier on some nights and got more sleep.
* I helped a friend move, and was actually excited about it. The move was nasty, up many flights of stairs. I ran boxes and furniture up the stairs with badass enthusiasm, while others around me were not so into it. That felt good. Not really related to the web blackout, but I think my attitude was a bit different than usual.
After re-connecting with the internet - I had an epiphany about the sense of urgency regarding web surfing, and reddit in particular. This hit me while I checked reddit for the first time after the blackout.
I realized that some web site content seems more or less urgent than other sites. The urgency level of this content, combined with the volume, can greatly effect my visit frequency of that site.
Take an RSS feed for example. This has a low sense of urgency because the posts generally are low volume, and they aren't going anywhere. If I don't look at it for a while its no big deal. Reddit on the other hand... an endless stream of incoming content, and the urgency level is super-high. In my head, my brain says: If I don't look at this post now, I'm never going to see it again. Reddit's content volume is so high that new content constantly pushes away the old content. I think this plays a big role in why reddit was addictive for me. I would visit reddit multiple times a day so I didn't miss anything or be out of the loop.
Whats next:
By adjusting my browsing to avoid high-urgency content, I can lower my browsing session frequency and start spending less time online.
I am done with Reddit, permanently - as it was my high-urgency problem site. My regular browsing is cut down to 3 small-community forums (MMM's forum being one of them), and my RSS feed subscriptions to music news that I want to keep up on (artists, bands, scene news...). All of these items have a very low sense of urgency to them. I can ignore them for weeks and be ok.