Back when I was working for a consulting company, I developed some unhealthy, time-wasting habits. I was often bored at work, so I browsed the web and chatted on the internal chat system. I happen to be very good at multi-tasking, so this was not too big a deal and I still got my work done on time and up to the desirable standard despite this. When I switched to working for myself, however, this had to go.

The decision was quite clear in my mind. I was determined to focus on my business. Did it work? Like hell. I kept on browsing the web at all hours just like before. I knew it was a time-waster, and I knew I couldn’t afford it, but I spent maybe half my day browsing websites like Reddit (which, although highly interesting, is really a complete waste of time).

So what did I do to change that? After failing to simply decide to stop browsing the web all day, I used an approach outlined on Steve Pavlina’s blog. In one of his articles about willpower, Steve suggests that to change habits, we must change the conditions that allow or even encourage those habits to persist. Identify these conditions, fix them with one little spurt of willpower (achievable by most), and then let the power of “defaults” take over.

The condition that hurt me in this case was that the browser and the chat window were available to suck my attention. I had a habit of opening up the window, and typing “reddit.com” or “slashdot.org” or “theregister.co.uk” in there without even thinking about it. By the time my conscious mind realised what was happening, my attention had already been grabbed by a sensationalist headline and I simply had to read it, because at the end of the day, I’m a curious guy, and I hate to leave stories unfinished in my head.

The change was very simple, laughably so in hindsight. I installed a plugin called LeechBlock into my Firefox. What this did is it blocked all those aforementioned websites between the hours of 6am and 6pm. I could still use Safari to access those sites if I really wanted to, but from my default browser, these sites became effectively inaccessible during the day. I still tried to go there. Even today I occasionally find myself staring at a “Site blocked” page while in the middle of something that has nothing to do with web browsing. Old habits die hard.

Still, thanks to this, I don’t waste much time online at all anymore. I definitely don’t miss Reddit at all, even though it’s so addictive. Ultimately, you’re no better off or worse off with or without the latest intricate political news from around the world. And when I pick up a new time-wasting site (interestingly, Steve Pavlina’s blog is one such site, since it’s so packed with interesting articles), if I see that it starts to become an attention-sink, I block it during the daytime. So far, this works very well.

This is true for most other time-wasters. All of them have conditions that encourage them, and generally those are conditions you can do something about.

For instance, if you have colleagues that come and chat to you all the time, the root cause of that is that you appear available for conversation. The fact is, once they start speaking to you, you will of course engage them in conversation, that’s just polite and natural. If you put headphones on to discourage them from even trying to chat to you unless they have something to say, you’ll take a whole great chunk out of those random useless conversations and find yourself much better able to concentrate.

If you tend to sit in front of the TV with your coffee and croissant and waste an hour every morning watching silly daytime shows (a not-so-uncommon affliction for those of us able to work at home!), the root cause of that is the fact that you have breakfast in front of the TV. Have breakfast in the kitchen and you won’t have to exert daily willpower to try and turn off the TV in the middle of a vaguely interesting show.

Each of these recurrent problems recurs because the conditions that encourage it keep happening over and over again. Almost every time, changing the conditions requires a lot less effort than changing the outcome. So figure out those root causes, change them, and get on with your day!