He's a proud Twitter Quitter

Ace of Spades writes a timely piece on avoiding distractions. Have we ever lived in a time when there were more distractions than we face in 2016? Here's Ace:

Been a month and a half, maybe, since I became a proud Twitter Quitter and several aspects of my life have improved. Less distraction = more actual time. Distracted time is crap time -- neither doing one thin nor the other; neither really working, nor really relaxing, either. The attempt to cheat work hours by mixing in zero-calorie non-entertainments (Twitter, Facebook. clickbait articles with pictures of large breasts (gets me every time) just winds up making you feel guilty about not working, and then you cheat your actual downtime by mixing in light crap that you can pretend is sort of work related (like "building your brand on Twitter") when it's really nothing of the sort.

Just leads to a bad habit of wasting work hours by doing low-quality, distracted work, and then "making up for it" by wasting leisure hours by doing low-quality, distracted leisure.

Here's another NYT article that's (sort of) vaguely about the idea of defeating a bad habit by changing your every day environments and patterns. Actually, it's about a woman who lost weight by leaving the city she had grown fat in and moving permanently to a place she had gotten thin in (in fat camp), but I think one can take it more broadly as an endorsement of the idea that bad habits need to be dehabituated.

I guess that's kind of obvious. But I read a good point, somewhere: No one can make any change by willpower. People's reservoirs of willpower are limited. The only way to make changes is to do things as a habit until they become a habit. Then just try to maintain the habit.

I guess that's not such a big distinction but I think there's something to it.

Read more here.

I am also a proud Twitter Quitter.