If you’re not as excited about going outside as you’d like to be, it can be helpful to get a dog or pick up an interest such as plant literacy, birding, or running every street in your city. Lots of Recursers enjoy completely unplugging from our devices and going to nature to reset our brains! It includes great prompts for stretches, refocusing your eyes, and generally taking care of your body. Stretchly is a desktop app that periodically reminds you to take stretch breaks. In addition to an end-of-day routine, we also both do an end-of-week routine where we reflect on how the week felt and plan for the next week. I use this time to nuke all my tabs and save only the todo items that I actually plan to carry out. Taniya and I also both find it extremely helpful to have an end-of-day routine where we reflect on the day, make an agenda for the next day, and tidy up our physical and digital workspaces. It’s a good reminder to notice that time has passed, check in, and see if I’m still working on something that seems like a good thing to work on. I’m not great at sticking to pomodoros, but do find the recurring timer useful, much in the same way a recurring meditation bell is useful. Other common tactics for fellow distractioneers: timeboxed accountability sessions (such as meeting up to say what we’re working on and then briefly presenting 1-2 hours later), pair programming, and pomodoros. Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit describes a similar strategy for breaking ingrained habits. ![]() By catching myself in the act, I can often stop. I’m not doing anything with the resulting data, but the simple act of noticing that I’m about to leap down an internet hole such as Reddit, and physically making the tally mark, has been extremely helpful. Taniya and I started tallying how often we get sidetracked during the day. ![]() I’ve also written about staying on top of your shit as a flawed human and tidying your digital life. I love making my devices deeply unengaging so that I don’t feel drawn to check them often. What are your top 2-3 needs to keep your body happy? Channeling your focus Some need to have sunlight gradually cranked up onto their face in the morning, and some desire perfect darkness until the moment they awaken. Some benefit from white noise machines, some don’t. Sleep hygiene is another really important one for many people! f.lux goes a really long way in filtering blue light out of your displays after the sun goes down so that your body isn’t artificially scammed out of getting sleepy.ĭistractibility Accountabilibbudies seem to vary on their sleep hygiene needs otherwise, though. If I skip them, I deflate and become an aimless, shambling husk with no executive function. This will vary by person, but personally, my prerequisites for having executive function are breakfast, sunshine, and water. Of course, analog paper is another favorite low-distraction notetaking method. Obsidian is a common RC favorite, since it’s not only free, Markdown-based, and local-first (meaning you own all your data), but is also extensible with community-contributed plugins. Graph-linked tagged note taking systems, or “knowledge management systems”, are often a more cohesive way to retrieve notes than traditional hierarchical filesystem-like methods. Help, my note-taking is ineffective or chaotic The best part for me is immediately realizing the instant I’ve nuked all the precious tabs that I don’t need the vast majority of them, and can just pull out the few tabs I actually plan to follow up on.Ģ. Fortunately, OneTab is a cross-browser extension that lets you nuke all your tabs while saving the session to local storage so that you can retrieve it later. The allure to hoard all possible information is strong in the modern era. Help, I am perpetually drowning in a sea of browser tabs I started a computer hygiene channel and have been running a weekly Distractibility Accountability meetup at RC, and a lot of useful discussions and tips have come out of them! Here are some favorites. ![]() ![]() For me, much of this is the art of curbing distraction, remembering to nourish my body, and staying mindful of how the things I’m doing are aligning with my goals. One of the things I’ve been working on while at Recurse Center is brain hygiene – a challenging practice for anyone with a computer-centric career.
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