8 Practical Tips to Cure Your Internet ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder)

This is a guest post from Alex Brie of Hack the Day.

You know you have it - every nerd does - the tickling sensation in the left hand to press Alt+Tab or Cmd+Tab to switch apps, Internet browser tabs or windows, to go from your email to Firefox, Instant Messenger, Twitter, your current work and back to Firefox.

No matter what you do, it seems like nothing is important enough to prevent you from writing a brief IM message to your best bud about what the latest joke your office mates have just sent you by email.

Nothing is too important that can’t wait till after you play a quick online flash game or read another blog post while your boss is out of the room.

Internet Attention Deficit Disorder is the productivity killer affecting most office workers today - the stringent urge to “browse just a little more” in between your daily work tasks; to peek at the Digg homepage, check out the hottest YouTube video of the day, skim through your blog feeds reading what happened in the last hour, to jump eagerly whenever Outlook or Mail.app alert you of new mail and interrupt all activity when you get via IM a link to a funny picture.

Sure, GTD, Zen To Done and most other productivity methods try to help you manage your priorities better and ignore the insignificant. But how could you ever do this if there’s always “one more” blog post to read, “one more” IM to answer, “one more” twitter status to check out?

Enter our brief list of tips to detect, manage, contain and even cure the Internet ADD. Here on Zen Habits you’ve read plenty of tips on how to focus on the most important tasks of the day and ignore the trivial things. But now we’ll look at tips to do that, aimed specifically at the Internet ADD:

Detect your timewasters! Time online is spent in many ways you are probably not aware of. You need to monitor your browsing habits and discover your time wasters - know thy enemy.
- Track your software usage - there are quite a few shareware programs, but the best tool I found so far the job is time snapper for Windows - the pro version is a bit expensive but gives you nice reports on what apps you use most, saves screenshots of your desktop, and even comes with a “productivity calculator”. It is available for free in a trial version so you can track your computer-usage habits without paying anything. The freeware version is extremely useful as well, though it doesn’t have the nice reports. I don’t know of anything similar for Apple, so give us a sign if you do…
- If the previous app doesn’t do much for you, you can still learn for free how much time of the day you use Firefox. Track it with this nifty extension - as seen on Lifehacker.com. It doesn’t do much, just counts the seconds the Firefox window has the focus. Simple yet scary once you see the results.
- For a more detailed view of your main Internet time wasters, a Firefox extension developed by two neuroscientists with an interest in compulsive internet behavior comes to the rescue - Page Addict records your visited websites and displays online reports & charts. You can also group the sites by tags/the domain of interest - blogs, email, news, work, search, to get a more broad view of where your daily time goes.

Let’s say we discovered what the main online time wasters are. You were shocked, just like me, at the amount of involuntary time you spend daily, just browsing around. What can you do?

First of all, remember, the Internet is a tool. A useful one, but a tool nonetheless. Whenever you feel crowded by the new blog posts alerts, the instant messages or email in your inbox, do what you’d do with any other annoying tool. Take control. Ignore it. Let it wait.

Offline Day. Try to cure your Internet Addiction by having, at least once a month, a “completely offline” day. From the time you wake up till the time you go to sleep, avoid any contact with the Internet. No PDA, no email, no IM, no blogs.
Offline Hours. During work, institute an “offline hour” habit, the time when you Get Work Done. Just go to Control Panel / Network (on Windows) or System Preferences / Network and click “Disable/Disconnect”. Warning, the first time it might feel weird. This is the time you do your offline work - write memos, write code, etc. If you really NEED to get stuff from the Internet, write it down and move to the next item on your to-do list. No matter what, only go back online after the hour has passed. You’ll be surprised how much stuff you can get done with a bit of volunteer offline time.
Internet Browsing. The Firefox extension mentioned above, Page Addict, offers the perfect solution to limit the time you waste browsing the web - for each group of websites you defined using tags, you can specify the number of minutes you allow yourself to spend daily. Once you reach the daily limit on the group, you’ll be met with the message get back to work! page access blocked by pageaddict. What else can we say, but … brilliant!
No Twitter @ work. Nothing is more annoying than an SMS cutting into your flow. While it’s nice to learn that your friend’s cat has just been washed, it’s nothing you want to learn while doing your job. Go to your Twitter settings page and tell it not to notify you during your work hours.
Discreet Instant Messaging. IM gets more and more used in many people’s jobs, whether they are freelancers or corporate employees. If you can’t live without it, try to at least contain the damage:
- Separate accounts for home/work. It seems so hard to have separate IM accounts, but it’s worth it: no more “wazzaa dude, we got soo wasted last night” messages coming from your college buddy in the exact moment your boss was looking over your shoulder, and no more “did you finish the TPS reports?” messages coming in the middle of a peaceful Saturday family dinner.
- Go invisible! Hate the time you waste chatting with your IM buddies? Most IM programs allow you to go “invisible” - you’ll still be online and can receive messages from people who really want to contact you.
- Disable sound alerts and popups. You’re much too familiar with it - you were just getting “in the flow”, really focusing on the job and starting to get things done, when an IM window pops up with a buzz and interrupts you. First thing you should do when installing an IM program is to disable the alert notifications - sure they seem useful, but they aren’t. No popups, no Growl notifications. Instant Messaging should be called this way because it ALLOWS you to answer immediately, not because it FORCES you to.
Reduce email interruption. I’m stating the obvious here - just like for IM, try to have two separate email accounts - one for your personal and one for your professional life. Get better anti-spam filtering, so that your Inbox only contains real messages. Define filters, labels and rules, and (on Gmail) Archive anything that matches them - move as much stuff out of your Inbox as possible.
Check out stuff only on predefined schedules. Looking at the Dock/Taskbar to see if any new mail has landed in your Outlook / Mail.app can become a bad habit really quickly. Instead, set your Taskbar/Dock to auto-hide, and try learning to check them at predetermined fixed times only. You can define recurring alerts on your phone, calendar or even with Quicksilver to remind you of the moments you allow yourself to check email, go online for a bit of browsing or IM your friends.

There are certainly many more tips you can do to cure your Internet ADD - for instance, when doing hard work, setting your browser preferences to block images, Flash or Java applications can avoid a lot of distractions. For instance, when I was in college, during exams season we used to unplug the computer altogether to remove temptation, and only allow ourselves a quick browsing or gaming session for an hour or so, as a reward after the exam. It surprisingly worked pretty well.

What are your tips to cure Internet ADD? Let us know in the comments.

Alex Brie blogs about productivity and life hacks at Hack the Day. Read more of his posts, including Turn your Desktop into a Productivity tool and The Greatest Productivity Tip in the World, or subscribe to his feed.

If you liked this article, please bookmark it in del.icio.us. Thanks!

8 Practical Tips to Cure Your Internet ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder)

This is a guest post from Alex Brie of Hack the Day.

Nothing is too important that can’t wait till after you play a quick online flash game or read another blog post while your boss is out of the room.

Detect your timewasters! Time online is spent in many ways you are probably not aware of. You need to monitor your browsing habits and discover your time wasters - know thy enemy.
- Track your software usage - there are quite a few shareware programs, but the best tool I found so far the job is time snapper for Windows - the pro version is a bit expensive but gives you nice reports on what apps you use most, saves screenshots of your desktop, and even comes with a “productivity calculator”. It is available for free in a trial version so you can track your computer-usage habits without paying anything. The freeware version is extremely useful as well, though it doesn’t have the nice reports. I don’t know of anything similar for Apple, so give us a sign if you do…
- If the previous app doesn’t do much for you, you can still learn for free how much time of the day you use Firefox. Track it with this nifty extension - as seen on Lifehacker.com. It doesn’t do much, just counts the seconds the Firefox window has the focus. Simple yet scary once you see the results.
- For a more detailed view of your main Internet time wasters, a Firefox extension developed by two neuroscientists with an interest in compulsive internet behavior comes to the rescue - Page Addict records your visited websites and displays online reports & charts. You can also group the sites by tags/the domain of interest - blogs, email, news, work, search, to get a more broad view of where your daily time goes.

Let’s say we discovered what the main online time wasters are. You were shocked, just like me, at the amount of involuntary time you spend daily, just browsing around. What can you do?

Offline Day. Try to cure your Internet Addiction by having, at least once a month, a “completely offline” day. From the time you wake up till the time you go to sleep, avoid any contact with the Internet. No PDA, no email, no IM, no blogs.
Offline Hours. During work, institute an “offline hour” habit, the time when you Get Work Done. Just go to Control Panel / Network (on Windows) or System Preferences / Network and click “Disable/Disconnect”. Warning, the first time it might feel weird. This is the time you do your offline work - write memos, write code, etc. If you really NEED to get stuff from the Internet, write it down and move to the next item on your to-do list. No matter what, only go back online after the hour has passed. You’ll be surprised how much stuff you can get done with a bit of volunteer offline time.
Internet Browsing. The Firefox extension mentioned above, Page Addict, offers the perfect solution to limit the time you waste browsing the web - for each group of websites you defined using tags, you can specify the number of minutes you allow yourself to spend daily. Once you reach the daily limit on the group, you’ll be met with the message get back to work! page access blocked by pageaddict. What else can we say, but … brilliant!
No Twitter @ work. Nothing is more annoying than an SMS cutting into your flow. While it’s nice to learn that your friend’s cat has just been washed, it’s nothing you want to learn while doing your job. Go to your Twitter settings page and tell it not to notify you during your work hours.
Discreet Instant Messaging. IM gets more and more used in many people’s jobs, whether they are freelancers or corporate employees. If you can’t live without it, try to at least contain the damage:
- Separate accounts for home/work. It seems so hard to have separate IM accounts, but it’s worth it: no more “wazzaa dude, we got soo wasted last night” messages coming from your college buddy in the exact moment your boss was looking over your shoulder, and no more “did you finish the TPS reports?” messages coming in the middle of a peaceful Saturday family dinner.
- Go invisible! Hate the time you waste chatting with your IM buddies? Most IM programs allow you to go “invisible” - you’ll still be online and can receive messages from people who really want to contact you.
- Disable sound alerts and popups. You’re much too familiar with it - you were just getting “in the flow”, really focusing on the job and starting to get things done, when an IM window pops up with a buzz and interrupts you. First thing you should do when installing an IM program is to disable the alert notifications - sure they seem useful, but they aren’t. No popups, no Growl notifications. Instant Messaging should be called this way because it ALLOWS you to answer immediately, not because it FORCES you to.
Reduce email interruption. I’m stating the obvious here - just like for IM, try to have two separate email accounts - one for your personal and one for your professional life. Get better anti-spam filtering, so that your Inbox only contains real messages. Define filters, labels and rules, and (on Gmail) Archive anything that matches them - move as much stuff out of your Inbox as possible.
Check out stuff only on predefined schedules. Looking at the Dock/Taskbar to see if any new mail has landed in your Outlook / Mail.app can become a bad habit really quickly. Instead, set your Taskbar/Dock to auto-hide, and try learning to check them at predetermined fixed times only. You can define recurring alerts on your phone, calendar or even with Quicksilver to remind you of the moments you allow yourself to check email, go online for a bit of browsing or IM your friends.

What are your tips to cure Internet ADD? Let us know in the comments.

If you liked this article, please bookmark it in del.icio.us. Thanks!

Posted on 18 June 2007 in Simplicity, Technology |
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Comments (32)

Georgio Says:

June 18th, 2007, 5:25 am

I work from home mainly and have shifted the router into the kitchen. It is switched off all the time. If I want to use it I have to tell my partner what for and how long I’ll be on the net for. She pulls the plug or gives a reminder. Having that accountability to someone else really helps.

Alex Says:

June 18th, 2007, 6:02 am

Georgio - now that’s an extreme but extremely effective solution…
Cut the bad seed from its roots, right? :-)

toen Says:

June 18th, 2007, 6:41 am

also from zenhabits ;)
plan your day at night, set 3 most-important-things.
wake up early, start early.
start early with yout MIT - a good start is good.
apply GTD, be discipline on that.
apply 80/20 on many aspects (to do, food, speak, etc.)
dont surf as a break activity (walk, talk, etc.).
evaluate your day (night), how to improve, make a log.
meditate (night), experience the very moment.
that could reduce our ‘passion’ .. to browse :)

Som Says:

June 18th, 2007, 8:28 am

I like Toen’s comment!!! :)
May sound “Mechanical” - however - and at this age people are finding some stress from marriage, work, relatives, environ etc…having a systemic disciplined way of life (like Leo says) and exploring one’s spirituality will put your inner self at calm and peace :)

Betsbillabong Says:

June 18th, 2007, 9:54 am

Does anyone know if there’s anything like “Time Snapper” for OSX, or like the Firefox plug-ins for Safari? I greatly prefer Safari to Firefox, but would love to track this for a while.

Thanks,
BB

John-o Says:

June 18th, 2007, 10:50 am

I was a big time “facebook” person until I started counting how many times a day I was visiting the site… It was an eye opener for me when I started accounting for myself… The key to avoiding your internet ADD is to be accountable and honest to yourself… It is like a diet for work… facebook, im’s and amazon are the pizza, candy and ice cream of your work day

HopefulGirl Says:

June 18th, 2007, 11:16 am

What great tips! I am reading this artice while finishing a report for work and IMing my roommate. HA!

Thanks for the advice and helping me identify my problem.

Teeny Says:

June 18th, 2007, 11:45 am

I just looked over my shoulder to be sure you weren’t watching me! I just got done reading Getting Things Done, and I am in the process of implementing it, but one problem now is actually doing my work. I have my schedule, my inbox, and all of my NA’s (next actions) but the part of buckling down is the becoming the hard part.

Taking your advice, I am in the process of testing out pageaddict.com, maybe if I can see how much time I waste, it kick my ass in gear.

Thanks for the tips!

Dale Says:

June 18th, 2007, 12:46 pm

Good article! I played 3 games of freecell while reading it and checked out twitter, my IM, and three email accounts. Wow. I need to follow your advice. Thanks.

BTW, how does one implement this instant preview mode?

kleanchap Says:

June 18th, 2007, 14:25 pm

What is the 80/20 principle? Can someone please explain this principle?

Great article and fantastic advice! I do suffer from the Internet ADD.

It does effect you physical and emotional health. My advice is to go out and meet real people and do exercises to stay healthy.

Emre Says:

June 18th, 2007, 14:45 pm

On Linux, I wrote a small shell script to shut off Internet connection between 22:00 and 15:00. A small script that I run from cron with a period of 7 minutes. Hence, the longest Internet connection for me is 7 minutes for these two hours. Here it goes

#!/bin/sh

isup="$( /bin/cat /etc/network/run/ifstate | /bin/grep -c eth1 )" if [ "$isup" -gt 0 ] ; then /sbin/ifdown eth1 fi

(Change eth1 with the network interface you’re using. Of course, this needs to be run as root.)

And the following is a cron job for this:
# m h dom mon dow user cmd 0-59/7 0-14,22,23 * * * root /root/shutoffinternet

Maybe a more elegant way without interrupting the local connection may be found, but this one works for me (for now, at least.) Maybe fellow Internet addicts find it useful.

MK Says:

June 18th, 2007, 16:37 pm

Interesting post, but I’ll be the first to admit that the ‘Offline Day’ is pretty hard to manage.

I got my wisdom teeth removed a couple weeks ago, and the medicine made me light headed, so I spent almost a week in bed.

But I, at least once or twice, still managed to force my lightheaded-self up the stairs to check my email.

I’ll have some days that I just watch tv most of the day instead of get online, but during commercial breaks I still gotta check my email. x.X

way Says:

June 18th, 2007, 18:19 pm

Set your mail to check every 30min instead of every 2. That alone has done wonder for me. Most people can wait 30minutes for a reply, and if they can’t they’ll IM or call.

-C- Says:

June 18th, 2007, 18:36 pm

I’ve been using Workrave for a while now, initially because I suffer from RSI in my mouse hand. I find that the regular rest breaks help me structure my day better.
The alerts can certainly be annoying (especially the persistent Micro Breaks), but it’s well worth it :)

AgentSully Says:

June 18th, 2007, 20:14 pm

just curious - do you use twitter, Leo?

Adam Snider Says:

June 18th, 2007, 21:14 pm

“Discreet Instant Messaging”

Yes! Most of the people at my office use IM to talk to each other, because the layout of the building makes it inconvenient to walk to the other person’s office (unless they’re right beside your office). However, I think most of them use there home accounts for work.

I setup a new MSN account just for work, using my work email address. The only contacts I have on there are work contacts, which means far fewer distractions during the day.

Dan Gebhardt Says:

June 19th, 2007, 0:01 am

Great article. Tracking my time as I work with LiveTimer.com has really helped improve my ability to single task. If I’m timing a particular task with LiveTimer, I tend to stay focused upon it, and I’m more reluctant to stop the timer to “waste” time. Disclaimer: I’m also one of the developers of LiveTimer.

Leo Says:

June 19th, 2007, 0:50 am

Great comments, everyone! I want to thank Alex for this great post as well.

@AgentSully: No, I don’t use Twitter. I also don’t use Skype or IM, and I’ve cut my RSS reading down to once a day, and my email down to 1-2 times a day (unless I have something urgent to send, like an assignment).

Mandy Says:

June 19th, 2007, 6:17 am

This is great. I wish I could live by it!!!

Brooke Says:

June 19th, 2007, 14:18 pm

Hahaha, wow. I opened this in a new tab about 5 hours ago and I’m just getting around to “skimming” it! I guess I’m the kind of offender this article is all about!

Rangi Says:

June 20th, 2007, 8:46 am

I started reading this post but got distracted and did something else ;-)

M.S. Says:

June 20th, 2007, 9:57 am

I heard about this article on the Slashdot Review podcast and had to check it out. Some of your insights and suggestions are great, and I really appreciate them. Just last week I started to become panicky about how many work hours I was wasting on futile websurfing, and (not being aware of the Page Addict utility), I just used a hammer and found out how to block certain websites completely by making simple edits to the Windows HOSTS file.

Details here: http://www.allthingsmarked.com/2006/08/28/howto-block-websites-using-the-hosts-file/

It’s a much less subtle method than using a Firefox extension with a timer, but it has the advantage of blocking access on ALL browsers installed on your machine. With Page Addict, I think the temptation to cheat by simply booting Opera or IE would be too great sometimes (and all of us hopeless page addicts usually have at least two browsers on our PC’s. Until I cleaned up last week, I had four, including the new Safari for Windows beta.)

Now this isn’t a criticism, but as someone genuinely diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder, I think it’s very important that we be careful how we throw the term “ADD” around. Some methods will work for people who may have a touch of Internet addiction and distractability, but may be counterproductive for people with the actual neurological condition. Many people with real ADD also suffer from related problems like anxiety disorders and depression. For myself, if I started tracking exactly how many hours I was wasting online, it would probably trigger a huge anxiety attack which would reduce, not increase, my productivity.

Frankly, this brave new world of always-on Internet access is a bit of a nightmare for people with ADD. I can’t shut off the Internet at work, because I need it to do my job, but it also pulls me away from what I should be doing.

Like right now, for instance. Back to work!

Thanks for listening!

Sean Says:

June 20th, 2007, 22:31 pm

Great article, and handy tips.

I’m gonna wander off now and look for one of these timers!

don geraldo Says:

June 21st, 2007, 8:35 am

i just read through the whole article wile working, for all of you, who suffer ADD the same way - check out webdesk.in it’s a nice tool to keep the workspace completely online.

peter Says:

June 22nd, 2007, 5:05 am

wonder how many people actually finished this article :p

Steve Says:

June 22nd, 2007, 19:24 pm

I wondered after I read this whether you can really cure your Internet ADD with anything short of unplugging the connection. I doubt I could, although the LeechBlock extension for Firefox was helpful for avoiding cnn.com and other “double” timewasters (unnecessary news AND unnecessary internet time).

Turning off all of the IM/email notifications has worked well, too, but I find myself flipping over to them far too often. And as for Twitter, deleting my account took care of that :)

rkt88edmo Says:

June 28th, 2007, 19:10 pm

This is a great article. I’m reaching the point that I am seriously worried about my performance being affected by a history as a practiced procrastinator and internet addict.