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I also struggle with this, but I have found some metaphorical band-aids that help a bit.

My phone's SIM no longer has any credit on it. I actively cannot browse mindlessly in a lot of places. Doesn't work perfectly, half of public transport around here has free WiFi, as do some shops, but it helps.

I have three laptops. One with the games on (Steam, Windows and nothing much else, no passwords installed except Steam… oh and Discord but I don't actually log in because the content was never interesting enough to get addicted to in the first place); one as a work machine (mac with Xcode, claude etc. installed); and one as a down-time machine (also a mac, but only co-incidentally).

Facebook itself isn't installed anywhere, though the Messenger app is for family I otherwise can't reach; various time-hungry sites (including FB, X, here*, reddit, several news sites) are blocked as best as I can block them (harder than it should be: on iPhones the "time limit" tool doesn't allow "zero" and reflexes to tap "ignore limit" are too quick to form, on desktop it's increasing ignoring my hosts file).

YouTube has so many ads, it's no longer possible for me to habit-form with it. Well, that and the home suggestions are consistently 90% bad, and the remaining 10% includes items in my watch-later playlist that I don't get around to watching.

* see my comment history for how well that attempt at self-control is actually working.



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