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.
What has worked (a little bit) for me…
Make notes and reminders everywhere. Everywhere. I have time blocked off on my work calendar, do this specific task at this time, do this specific task at this time, 15 minutes of fucking around time in between. I will literally make a calendar appointment for taking breaks from work. I have a Kanban board of personal tasks to work on. I have alarms on my phone and watch reminding me to take a break for lunch or when to clean the litter boxes, etc.
One benefit of having reminders everywhere is that even when I’m consciously avoiding “The Thing I am Supposed to be Doing,” there’s a higher probability that I will land on something else productive to do instead of zoning completely out. I know I need to write this report by the end of the day, but I just saw a reminder that I need to reschedule my dental appt. Great, I still did something productive. Now I’m one step closer to actually writing that report.
It’s also important to give yourself grace and acknowledge that you’ll never be perfectly productive. Sometimes my 15 minute fuck-around break last 30 minutes. That’s OK. Breathe and get through it. Find the next post-it note or block of time on the calendar that tells me what I should be doing and make an honest attempt to do that. It’s not 100% effective, but it does help set the guardrails so I don’t get too far off track.