I really need som tips on how to avoid getting trapped by my own hyperfokusing.

I very often i get completely consumed by either youtube shorts or something similar and i loose complete sense of time and spends literally 5 hours on just doom scrolling and wasting time. The worst part is that I’m hyperly aware that I’m doing it the whole time and I really want to stop but I just won’t shake myself off of it. I feel so bad because i should go walk the dog or go do my hobies instead. It happens the most often when I’m supposed to work from home and it makes the guilt feel even worse. If only I could do something for myself at least while not actually working. The only way I’ve found working so far is blocking the websites from me using blockers but I know that I’ll just either circumvent them or find something else that’s equally bad for me to hyperfokus on. And I do have legitimate reasons to use YouTube sometimes for work for tutorials etc so blocking it doesn’t really work so well for me.

How do I get out when I find myself in that trapped state? Let me know how you are dealing with it.

I wanna add that I’m medicated with methylphenidate but it doesn’t really work on getting out of the trap if I’ve first gotten in.

  • snrkl@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    4·
    5 days ago

    I have separate logins on my machine for work vs home.

    I also have my obsidian task manager synced on both machines so when non work stuff pops into my head, I add it to my list to work on after work in my personal task manager and get back to work.

    I have a sacred 30mins at the start of the day to drink a coffee, and review my work task list, and plan what I will do today. From there, I ONLY work on what’s on the list, unless my boss rings me and changes the priority (or equivalent person etc).

    As for not getting sucked into these things at all: I just avoid anything non work related while working, until I’ve achieved my list of work deliverables for the day, and finish work…

    That works for me, until I have some work related YouTube video or equiv… I had a 4hr YT Shorts spiral the other day, was just lucky it started at 430pm!

    I’ve since found that the DuckDuckGo browser let’s me watch YT videos without going to YT, so I don’t get the autoplay trap sprung one when the work related video is finished, which has helped a lot.

    • Nexius_Lobster@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      5 days ago

      I also have my obsidian task manager synced on both machines so when non work stuff pops into my head, I add it to my list to work on after work in my personal task manager and get back to work.

      This is my first time meeting another obsidian user on lemmy! What plugin do you use to manage your task? (I use habit tracker 21 myself)

      • snrkl@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
        2·
        4 days ago

        Built in tasks and data view for filtering.

        Ping me separately if you want to compare notes…

        • Nexius_Lobster@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          4 days ago

          Built in tasks and data view for filtering.

          I didn’t know you could filter for tasks using dataview. That’s so cool