How to Stop Scrolling When You Said You Would

Degree of difficulty: Easy

Benefit: Save potentially hours a day, depending on your habits

A simple tool every procrastinator should own is a kitchen timer. It has lots of uses, but one is to force you to move your whole body from one room to another just to turn off its annoying sound.

If you set a timer to limit how long you plan to engage in scrolling, binge-watching, gaming, or some other open-ended activity – and you put that timer in the next room, where you can hear its blaring alarm but not reach it – you basically have to get up when it goes off.

Think of what a powerful ability this is for a chronic procrastinator. By pushing a few buttons, you can essentially cast a spell on yourself, forcing you to return to a particular place at a particular time. In seconds, you’ve created a hard deadline that even a seasoned time-waster will have trouble ignoring.

I call this technique the Distance Timer. Set a timer at a distance, and you have to get up to shut the damn thing off. Excuses and rationalization will not work.

What happens without the Distance Timer

The distance timer enforces your promise to yourself to stop when you said you would. You already know what happens when you don’t have to get up after your self-allotted “fun time” is over.

The classic procrastinator’s thought process is this: Oh, I’ll just do this fun/easy/addictive thing for a bit, and I will simply stop doing it at the intended time. Then, I’ll just get up and go do something productive.

Of course, when your initial 15 minutes is up, any impulse to stop is gone. The new impulse to try to justify continuing for a bit longer.

First it’s just another 5 minutes. Then, seeing that it’s 10:51, you decide it’s probably fine if you continue until the top of the hour – 9 more minutes. Uh oh, looks like it’s almost sort of lunch time – maybe afternoon is the right time to get to work for real. *Keeps scrolling*

Setting a distance timer will physically prevent that cycle from happening. Before you begin the scrolling, the surfing, or gaming, you set your kitchen timer in the next room. You hit Start and then go enjoy yourself.

When the alarm goes off, it doesn’t care about your silly bargaining. It will bleep annoyingly, over and over, and ruin the fun. It’s beautiful.

The alarm shuts off the electro-magnet effect

Attention-sinks like screens have an electro-magnet effect. As long as your attention is captured in its magnetic field, it takes a lot of force to break the bond.

The bleeping of a sufficiently annoying alarm is enough to disrupt the electro-magnet effect of Instagram, news apps, or whatever attention sink has grabbed you. Nothing fun can happen until you get up and turn it off – which forcibly breaks the bond.

Then you have a little gap, free of the magnetic force on your attention. You have a chance to switch gears. Use this gap!

There’s always a danger of slipping back into the attention sink, so you have to be vigilant. But at least for the moment, the tractor-beam gripping your attention is broken. You can consciously choose what you do next.  

What kind of timer to get

You definitely want your timer to have an awful electronic bleeping that goes on for a long time. It has to be a fun-ruiner. Most of them are. The easier it is to set, the better.

Note that your phone’s timer app will not work for this. First of all, the phone is often the thing you want to tear yourself away from. Also, you don’t want to have to unlock your phone and thumb through icons, dodging fifty potential electro-magnets, to use a Distance Timer. You want a boring, physical object with real buttons and one purpose.

Here’s the one I use. (No affiliation.) I have three of them. The blaring goes on for a full minute, which is enough for me. If you’re prone to extreme tunnel vision and think you might doomscroll through a full minute of electronic beeping, then you want to find one that goes on for longer, or forever. There are lots of options.

Seize the gap and do *anything else*

The effectiveness of the Distance Timer depends on what you do once you turn it off. My advice is to choose an activity that’s still easy, but is somewhat productive, physical, and less addictive. Go collect stray dishes and put them by the sink. Go get the mail. List what you want to do for the rest of the day.

The vital thing is to use the gap created by the timer to do anything else but continue wasting your time in the same way.

Further reading:

If you aren’t sure what to do after turning the timer off, one option is to have a little list of easy but useful/wholesome activities you can do anytime, taped somewhere you can see it. I call this a Cupboard Sheet, because I put mine inside my kitchen cupboard.

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