A Way to Manage Distractions That Works

For years, I've been trying new strategies to limit how much social media apps distract me from work and my surroundings and pull me into their slot-machine world.

Blocking and uninstalling apps worked to some extent, but they either failed to work long-term or were not an option in the first place.

Then, I tried a different approach. One that doesn't eliminate the distraction but morphs it into a better choice than doomscrolling social media.

In this article, I'll share why this approach is fundamentally better and works, and how you can use it with minimal friction.

But before we dive into the nitty-gritties, let's start with:

A backstory and the problem

A few months earlier, I realised that I've been spending hours a day scrolling through my never-ending Instagram feed and forwarding reels to friends.

It started as a harmless few minutes of downtime between work, but had gradually spiralled to a massive time-sink and a mind-numbing affair.

So, I followed the gold-standard advice and did what anyone else would do — deleted Instagram from my phone.

And it worked.

I no longer had Instagram to reach for whenever I felt the slightest hint of boredom or during my breaks from work.

Happy ending, right? Unfortunately, no.

With Instagram out of the picture, I rebounded to the next available social media app on my phone, which was Threads.

Threads replaced Instagram for me, and I was unknowingly doomscrolling my feed for hours.

However, unlike Instagram, I didn't want to remove Threads from my phone because I use that profile for business, and I needed to check my account periodically to reply to comments on my posts and chat with others in the community.

Therefore, I tried the next best approach: blocking Threads during work.

But like my past attempts at blocking apps, this didn't work well for me, either.

Whenever I saw the blocker screen saying “You can't use Threads right now”, I would feel a tinge of discomfort and restlessness in my body.

I usually reached for Threads to distract my mind away from a problem I was stuck on, or just because I was bored, and now my phone won't let me do that.