Preliminaries: I spend startling amounts of time watching the randomest youtube videos (exhibits 1, 2, 3) and reading the most inane stuff of absolutely no use or entertainment value (comments on reddit and hacker news, lists of recommended books- but not the books themselves).
Terms: so no youtube videos or reading online unless it is related to something specific like cooking or writing. I will do this for a week starting immediately.
Measuring: My screen time for the last week was 17h phone + 46h laptop (wtf that is 9h/day of almost only leisure). I expect this to fall significantly. And hopefully more alertness and more boredom, leading to less brain fog.
Log: kept a running log here
Observations: I became aware of how many times I open youtube without any aim and then end up spending hours. So I did get more bored in the day, which is great. I did end up getting more focused reading done.
However if I did not sleep on time at night I would say fuck it and spend hours surfing. Same with just after waking up if I didn’t sleep well or I slept late. So I realised that late night and just after waking up are especially vulnerable times of the day for me. (Should that come as a surprise?) So ensuring I sleep on time and sleep enough seems to be more important.
I did log faithfully for the first 5 days but then gave up both trying to stop myself from browsing and logging it. Time spent on screens for the week was 46.5h laptop + 17h phone. So not much change from last week
Conclusion: I did realise how many times I go to these websites without any aim and spend hours, but more effective would be resolving my sleep schedule