Sabotage yourself from sabotaging your time

In a famous passage of Homer's Odyssey, the hero Ulysses gives his men the order:

"Bind me, to keep me upright at the mast, wound round with rope. If I beseech you and command to set me free, you must increase my bonds and chain even tighter."

Their ship was passing through the islands of the Sirens, creatures whose singing was so alluring, it caused sailors to leap into the sea and drown searching for them.

As expected, when Ulysses heard their song, he desperately tried to free himself. But the men respected his earlier order and kept him bound even tighter, until the danger was gone.

Another solution would have been to plug his own ears with beeswax (as his crew did) to avoid the music altogether, but Ulysses' strategy allowed him to live, and still hear the song of the Sirens.

As a dev and solo founder, wasting my time instead of working is the shortest path to bankruptcy. However, the tools I have to use to get the work done... were designed to waste as much of my time as possible. Think about how recent and ridiculous this problem is: could a seamstress be distracted by her pins, or a carpenter by his handsaw?

I don't want to sound entitled. I love what I do, and I love the fact that I can do it from home or anywhere in the world. But when you visit a professional networking website with the intention of reaching out to users, and instead end up looking at "crying ceo" memes and pseudo-motivational stuff, it's hard not to be frustrated.

But I don't blame myself, it's not my fault. If you ever opened a tab to go to Github, then caught yourself typing "youtu", you, too, know you don't stand a chance. So how do you resist the irresistible? Ulysses and his crew taught us two ways:

Remove the opportunity (plug your ears)
Remove your control (chain your wrists)

Removing the opportunity

Obviously, start by getting rid of everything you don't absolutely need that has the potential to distract you:
- Delete from your phone every single game, and every single app that has a feed. No excuses. If you get bored on the train home, read a book. Or learn how to experience boredom, it's good for you.
- If you can delete your accounts too, even better. Some platforms pretend to keep you in the loop, but don't fall for it, it's mostly noise. If something is important enough, you will hear about it.
What you can't remove, hide. Stuff it in subfolders. Remove the shortcuts. Physically keep it away from your desk. If you forget you have it, you never needed it.
Make distracting stuff hard to use. Use the awful browser version instead of the app. Log out of the accounts, and never default to "remember me in this device". Disable the accounts you can't permanently delete. Enable 2FA and remove the authenticator app.
- You can also add "screen time" (or equivalent) limits for distracting stuff you're forced to use. You can likely circumvent it, but it's going to annoy you, which is good.
Use an extension (like this one) to redirect a distracting website to another website. As a joke, I redirect social media to a resume-writing tutorial... to remind myself what my fate is if I fail!
Finally, a personal favourite of mine: customize your adblocker to hide all distracting parts of a website. For example, on Youtube I hide everything but the player. Some websites have dynamic class names, but you can use the css attributes selector to get around it. You can use my sample filter list to get started.

Removing your control

Use the self-control app (mac only) or similar. I add all the distracting websites and turn it on everyday before work for 12h. If there's a way to bypass this, please don't share it, or I'll mark your comment as hate speech (I'm half joking).
If you have someone you really trust, ask them to set up a parental control password on your phone. It's for children, which is kind of what you are. Mark the websites you want to block as "adult content". If you need access, tell them to enter the password, but under no circumstances should they tell you.
Similar to the one above, you can ask a partner or roommate to hide your phone or to put it in a safe or locker that you don't know how to open.

Closing remarks

The story of Ulysses and the Sirens is almost 3000 years, and if it survived to present day, its advice can't be that bad for you. The goal is to make these choices while you're at your best, in order to protect yourself when you're at your worst.

I have personally done every single thing in this list, and still do some of them everyday. Try one at a time and see what works best for you. Be experimental. Sabotage yourself.

PS: I was inspired to write this after reading the book Rationality by Steven Pinker. It's a good book, check it out.