HACKER Q&A
📣 impendia

"Check email/internet less often" resolution that is easy to keep?


For New Year's this year, I want to break my habit of checking my email inbox, as well as a variety of websites, absolutely all the time. Has anyone managed to do this, who has success stories to share?

As an academic I do get lots of email, much of it important or interesting, but there's nothing that can't wait a day for a reply. Sometimes these will be long and prompt hours of productive work, e.g. "Here's an idea for a research paper" followed by lots of explanation.

I tend to be good st sticking with resolutions when it's clear what I'm resolving -- e.g. when I was addicted to a certain computer game, I simply deleted it and quit cold turkey. With email and internet, there's "good use" and "bad use", but there's a slippery slope from the former to the latter, and I've not managed to keep any resolutions in the past.

Any success tips to share? Thanks!


  👤 rudasn Accepted Answer ✓
I don't use "the Internet" much, but this what I did:

- no notifications on new emails on mobile, only messaging apps (I have one, for work mostly)

- Slack paused notifications schedule

- disable javascript on mobile chrome, use another browser if js is required

- very few mobile apps (3-4), other than stock email, calendar etc