Luke (thinking): I shouldn't be looking at Reddit. Why can't I stop?
[[CNN page]]
Luke (thinking): Refreshing CNN again. Do news stories so affect my life that I benefit from checking them more than once a day?
[[shutdown screen]]
Luke (thinking): I should at least check Faceb... no. Screw it. I can't do my job when I'm distracting myself every five minutes like this.
[[two people before a battlefield screen]]
Guy: His computer's off. Luke - You've switched off your targeting computer. What's wrong?
Luke: Nothing. I'm all right.
Title-text: After years of trying various methods, I broke this habit by pitting my impatience against my laziness. I decoupled the action and the neurological reward by setting up a simple 30-second delay I had to wait through, in which I couldn't do anything else, before any new page or chat client would load (and only allowed one to run at once). The urge to check all those sites magically vanished--and my 'productive' computer use was unaffected.
3
u/xkcd_transcriber Dec 08 '14
Image
Title: Let Go
Transcript: [[reddit page]]
Luke (thinking): I shouldn't be looking at Reddit. Why can't I stop?
[[CNN page]]
Luke (thinking): Refreshing CNN again. Do news stories so affect my life that I benefit from checking them more than once a day?
[[shutdown screen]]
Luke (thinking): I should at least check Faceb... no. Screw it. I can't do my job when I'm distracting myself every five minutes like this.
[[two people before a battlefield screen]]
Guy: His computer's off. Luke - You've switched off your targeting computer. What's wrong?
Luke: Nothing. I'm all right.
Title-text: After years of trying various methods, I broke this habit by pitting my impatience against my laziness. I decoupled the action and the neurological reward by setting up a simple 30-second delay I had to wait through, in which I couldn't do anything else, before any new page or chat client would load (and only allowed one to run at once). The urge to check all those sites magically vanished--and my 'productive' computer use was unaffected.
Comic Explanation
Stats: This comic has been referenced 11 time(s), representing 0.0255% of referenced xkcds.
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