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Cal Newport in “Digital minimalism” has a plan of attack for addictive loops.

1) force yourself to use the mobile web site vs the dedicated app

2) at the end of the session log out, increasing the friction of using the app mindlessly




Another thing I've started doing that works for me is removing a page from the history on my browser. It's easy to mindlessly browse something like reddit when I can just type 'r' and hit enter because the browser autocompletes sites in my history, but even the 1 second it takes to type out 'reddit.com' gives my brain time to realize there's nothing in particular I wanted to look at, and I was just going there out of habit because I was bored.


I do this with Firefox on Android, with enabling the setting to clear all history & cookies on Quit action. And then I regularly quit the app. I add a bookmark for sites I do want to access easily for whatever reason. I feel this adds a pretty balanced amount of friction.


I have the same problem! I'd really like to turn off autocomplete completely to resolve it, but Chrome doesn't allow that. :( Remembering to manually remove the site from my history every time isn't gonna happen.


On mobile or desktop?

If you’re on desktop just go to settings and search for “autocomplete” - it might be under Google sync settings or advanced -> privacy settings for “use prediction service to help complete searches and urls”

If I’m wrong, it’s only because I’m using MS Edge and this was a question it asked during setup :)


Desktop. This stops Google from using online predictions, but there’s still an offline autocomplete sadly.




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