How to eradicate the desire to compulsively check messaging sites.

I used to be constantly checking messaging apps. Discord, Telegram, WhatsApp (and Email). They are the most skinner-boxy things I use since I don’t use other social media. But then I read the beautifully titled Distraction Affliction Correction Extension by xkdc and Why Email is Addictive and it turns out the secret to killing an addiction to these sites is really just as simple as adding a cost, and it is incredibly effective.

An easy cost to set up is a delay to opening the tab. What’s key about the delay is that is must be endured: no alt+tabbing around your computer as it loads, otherwise you have paid no cost. The extension Crackbook Revival does this perfectly, politely reminding you on the minimalist waiting page that the timer restarts if you switch away from the tab.

What’s extra cool about the extension is that you can set up increasing costs to procrastinatory behaviour by increasing the wait time on each check. . This is ridiculously effective in making me actively dislike checking these websites. I have it set to disable at 20:00, after the day is done and I can deploy my tired brain on what its best at.

Currently I have my starting time set to 10 seconds, set to climb by 2 seconds on each increase. I would strongly recommend starting at a number lower than this, maybe at 5 seconds, increasing by 1 second each check. A failure mode I doubt is uncommon would be setting a starting point that’s way to high and getting annoyed at the extension and deleting it after a month. Remember, the goal isn’t to do brilliantly now. It’s for you to be able to say in five years that you’ve eradicated this problem by chipping it at so slowly that each individual stage was never hard, but fun.

Funny thing is that this delay  probably even more effective than FocusMe, and have found myself rarely checking Discord even when FocusMe allows it. This has given me a massive mental resistance to checking these sites, which I consider a massive win.

Another benefit is that, as I have had to pay the cost quite often for important-on-discord-messages, I’ve gotten more used to sitting in silence for 10-40 seconds at a time, making the times when the internet is buggy far more bearable.

Problems:

I.

As this is a browser extension, it shares the property they all do, in that they are all notoriously easy to delete. And to change its settings. I find it does not take significant willpower to not delete the extension at all, though if you think this is not something you will be able to handle, something tougher like Focusme is likely better for you.

Or perhaps artificially bump up the cost of deleting the extension by committing with a partner that you’ll cough up 10$ if you delete it.

II.

Though my phone is significantly more barebones than it was this time 2 months ago, it unfortunately still is home to an unblocked Whatsapp and Telegram, and am not yet sure how to solve this. An extension like Crackbook for mobile would be heavenly, if you know of something similar please comment.

No, You Couldn’t — FocusMe and Free Will

Where Coulds Go from the amazing Replacing Guilt series is a post about what we’re actually able to do at any point. It’s about admitting to ourselves that we simply aren’t able to do everything at all moments, just like how you and I couldn’t snap our fingers now and cure world hunger.

I’ve been thinking a lot about free will recently. About how — looking retrospectively — it seems humans just don’t have it. We have no way of knowing why it wouldn’t be completely logical that every action a human takes is the only thing they could do in that moment, that if we skipped back the simulation of the universe by ten seconds, that every single one of the seven billion thought processes wouldn’t have ended up the exact same way they did the first time.

And this is why, particularly in the context of anger, every time we wished that someone could’ve just done something differently, could’ve just not said the rude thing, could’ve just been 20% more compassionate — they couldn’t have.

They couldn’t have! 

Because if they had had  the compassion / self-awareness needed in the moment for them to step back and not say the thing that annoyed you, they would’ve applied those skills and stopped themselves, and we’d be in that reality.

But they didn’t and we’re not, so we’re here, in the reality where their history just lead them to not be able to act in the way that you want. 

And knowing this is good. It gives us slightly more perspective than others, but not all of it. 

Because so can’t you.

It’s one thing to see other humans as deterministic, as poor half-monkeys who — even when they’re at peak annoyance — are just poor struggling animals who couldn’t do any better. But what about the things you berede yourself for not doing — like turning off Netflix at a reasonable time and going to sleep, or actually opening your habit spreadsheet, or any other thing that’s good but you don’t do — you just couldn’t do it!

Though it feels like we’re in power, we’re just cogs and gears, with a fragile slippery illusion of power and control on top of it (I’ve heard reports that taking enough drugs removes this illusion and you get to experience this setup how it’s actually like, and it’s terrifying).

Looking retrospectively, what we were able to do we did, and what we didn’t do — we just weren’t able to for a multitude of reasons!

So?

We don’t sit and whimper at this news. But rather, knowing what you can’t do makes you ridiculously more powerful, trust me.

By admitting to yourself again and again the constraints of the mind you’re working with you can make adjustments for those within those constraints, and you fix them far more robustly and effectively then if you tried again and again with the same old inevitably failing methods.

How to actually do things

If you actually want to start a habit, pick a trigger, get an accountability partner and a tracking sheet and setup at LEAST WEEKLY CALLS  and set it to open automatically so you actually check it.

As a rule of thumb, make as many habits as you can (in this instance actually checking and updating the spreadsheet) require ZERO EFFORT.

If you actually want to get off of a website, for god’s sake use FocusMe or Cold Turkey Blocker. Now if you’re a penniless sponge like me, find someone to pool with or to mooch off of! Setup a block for when you actually want to get off and make disabling the block a real pain and boom — your habit will be done by default and you can stop feeling guilty.

You CANNOT just do all the things you think you can. The sooner you admit this, the sooner you can start using tools to circumnavigate your monkey minds weaknessess and finally, actually become powerful.

I’m sure you can’t wait 🙂

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Ideas for this post are heavily inherited from the Replacing Guilt series, probably the best and most unintuitive guide to dropping your guilt and becoming powerful.

FocusMe is a real life saver. If you need a community where you’d find the types of people willing to pool on a FocusMe account or become your accountability partner, let me know. You may just be ready to join the mystical realm of the University of Bayes.

Oh also I’ve never linked so many posts in one post before. Obsessive linking is a side effect of incremental reading. Everything you’ve read becomes connected, it’s great 🙂 If you want a way to digest all of the mentioned posts and actually manageably read and remember them, I have a solution for you 😉

— Gingerjumble

The Main Reason You Should Switch from Anki to SuperMemo

SuperMemo makes learning fun.

I. Anki’s Imperfections

Some things you don’t notice until you leave them. Often times our brains aren’t ambitious enough, meta-enough, or creative enough to picture a better way of doing things, so we stay with the suboptimal technique.

That’s Anki.

In Anki, you make cards, one by one, deck by deck. And perhaps the monotony of that experience is drowned out by the excitement you feel from using spaced-repetition in the first place, from knowing that you’re miles ahead of your peers anyway.

Well you are, but at what cost?

Hours and hours of boredom. Of formulating questions and typing them in one by one, but that’s not SuperMemo.

II. What separates SuperMemo

Rather than making the cards one by one to remember facts/interesting tidbits from an article, you import the entire thing into SuperMemo. Then, when SuperMemo’s algorithm decides it’s best to show it to you based on the priority you set it, you read the article and highlight the important bits. You’ve just made an extract. Those extracts will then be shown to you later, and then you’ll extract some of that. Incrementally, you’ll boil down the article to every word with all the fluff to just the pure facts, of which you can make cards out of, seamless with the reading process.

And it’s fun!

Incremental Reading is fun, because you get to read articles you knew were interesting. Incremental Reading is fun because it combines creation with input, it combines recreation with learning, and it combines fun and work, without monotonously making cards one by one.

We do things that we’re incentivised to do, and if life-long learning is a painful, monotonous chore, we just won’t do it. SuperMemo makes learning fun. Don’t you want to want to do good things?

III. The Learning Curve

The creator of SuperMemo is an odd guy. Though he’s lovely, he doesn’t care much for advertising the product apart from the hefty articles he’s written about them. Combined with it’s difficult to grasp 90’s UI, it makes sense why you likely haven’t heard about it, not because it’s worse than Anki, quite the opposite in fact.

Luckily for me I was walked through the basics of the program in an hour by a lovely guy on the SuperMemo Wiki Discord , who freely teaches SuperMemo just because of how great the program is. He’s a great dude, though if you’re suspicious of his intentions I don’t blame you. But, after further interrogation by me, it seems his long term goal is to create a legion of geniuses. Neat!

IV. The Peace of Mind

Though I’ve only been using it for about a month, SuperMemo is easily the most important program I own. It gives such lovely peace of mind knowing I can now learn about ANYTHING. Anything I’ve been putting off learning for the last 2 years because of the monotony of Anki I can now easily import into SuperMemo, knowing that I’ll come across it and memorise it in time.

I don’t know how exactly I dealt with this dissonance before (I don’t even think I did because I didn’t realise there was a better way to do it after) but reading non-fiction books has largely been a waste of time, as I forget everything except, if I’m lucky, a singular shiny fact from it a week after putting the book down.

I love Incremental Reading because I can’t go back to not learning things forever. What would be the point?

If I’ve convinced you to give SuperMemo a shot, check out https://supermemo.wiki/learn/#/

And if you want to speak to other Discordian SuperMemo-users, check out their Discord! https://discord.com/invite/vUQhqCT

-Gingerjumble

Top Six Most Useful Chrome Extensions

As you probably already know, Chrome Extensions are the mini-in-browser-apps which can tweak how the browser behaves just for you, which can go on any good browser, including my browser Brave. You can get them (the vast majority which are free) from the Chrome Web Store. Once you know how they work, they can be incredibly useful, so here are the top six ones which you should definitely have.

Save Pinned Tabs

The pinned tabs system on chrome is pretty terrible. I think how it’s meant to work is that your tabs are smaller so you can fit more tabs, and they’re meant to stay each time you open a new window. But they do so rarely. It’s pretty clear not a lot of work has gone into pinned tabs. Save Pinned Tabs lets you set up what tabs you always want (for me it’s Evernote and Spotify) and you just have to click two buttons to get those tabs opened and pinned if chrome has decided it doesn’t want to do it this time. I have it set on auto, so Spotify and Evernote are always open for me.

Ublock Origin

A classic ad blocker. I know ad blocking can be considered unethical, but they are just so annoying. And Ublock is probably the purest ad blocker. The original AdBlocker was swayed over to the dark side and started allowing ads, but Ublock Origin knows what it’s for and keeps it simple. Buuut, Brave Browser does autoblock ads.

Grammarly

Over time, the Grammarly ads have grown on me. Like all products though, they advertise they’re premium features and make them seem like they’re free, which can get annoying. But once you’re accustomed to the pretty simple spelling and grammar corrections it gives, you’ll appreciate how grammar and spelling mitsakes you don’t have to catch (or not catch) anymore.

Form Filler

Ok, here’s a secret. There are actually ways of making money online. Ways that don’t require much work. They’re called surveys, and if you want some good links to survey platforms send a message in the contact me section. And here’s another secret. Some surveys have huge walls of boxes you have to select, and who has time for that. So Form Filler just auto fills all of them. Neat!

Distraction Free for Youtube

This is maybe the greatest extension that has ever been made. It gets rid of all the annoying attention fraying garbage on the side of Youtube, so you can watch what you came to watch in peace and solitude. We all know the Youtube comments are made out of what comes out the backside of dogs, cows, and even humans, yet for some reason we can’t stop scrolling down to see what they’re saying even when we’re enjoying the video! It’s not worth it! Don’t do it. Come back. Get Distraction Free.

Home New Tab Page

I’ve had home new tab page for so long I can hardly remember what the default google home page is. But who can deny that home new tab page is so sexy. I have it on rotating background image, and I’ve never had a bad one. It’s super customisable, you can get to all your tabs incredibly fast, there’s a notes page for stuff you have to get down quickly, there’s your email inbox straight to your homepage. Its so beatiful. You can store notes for later usage likes its nothing. And best of all, it automatically backups everything you have, so if you’re on a new computer or account, so if you’re on a new computer you can port all that good stuff back in like it was never gone, it’s amazing!

What chrome extensions do you use? Leave a comment and tell me.

-GingerJumble

A Podcast Fast – What I’ve Learned

It’s no secret here that I love podcasts. The three posts on podcasts I did were maybe some of the most emotive stuff on this whole site. But after CGP Grey, a podcast and Youtube star, decided to take a break from listening to podcasts for about 4 months, I started to have doubts about how amazing listening to podcasts is. So, like the sheep I am, about a month ago I deleted my podcast app off my phone, and only relistened to a podcast yesterday, and this is how it went.

 

One Sided Relationships

At first, I was constantly desperate for stimuli. Discord had previously been an idle app on my phone that I only opened when one of the five people I talk to who don’t have WhatsApp decided to message me, but it then became my slot machine app. As in, I was constantly checking the Steven Universe and College Info Geek servers to see if anyone had messaged anything. Justifying the addiction by saying its good for me socially. Then I started to compulsively check Snapchat, which I begrudgingly have downloaded and usually have no problem with, but I would justify it by saying ‘It’s important to know what your friends are up to’. But I began checking it so much I had to ask my Snapchat friend to block me from seeing their stuff, and had to leave ALL my discord servers.

The Fear of Missing out had never struck me so badly. I’d gotten used to hearing Grey and Brady or Thomas and Martin talking to each other for hours and hours on end, I had grossly misattributed them as friends, despite the fact that they are in no way shape or form aware of my existence. So when I was forced away from this incredibly one sided relationship, I clinged onto human reaction wherever I could find it, in the shape of social media.

 

The Best Messaging App – (Discord vs Snapchat vs Whatsapp)

I have too many messaging apps. Unfortunately, the people I talk to are spread thin and aren’t all on the same platform (which would be preferable), so I have three messaging apps on my phone, and I’m here today to find which one is the best.

Snapchat is inherently a social media platform, with messaging features built in. WhatsApp is an alternative for SMS messaging that uses wifi to send messages rather than your credit, and Discord is an online messaging and socialising platform that was designed with gamers in mind. All three have messaging and calling features, so get ready for a detailed ranking on all the important things a messaging app should have. Enjoy!

Accessibility

1.  In first place for accessibility is Discord, for being able to be accessed on any device with access to the internet., but you need to confirm your email EVERY TIME you log in from a new browser, which is really a hassle when I’m trying to sneakily check my messages from a school computer.

2.  WhatsApp has a really frustrating solution to having access from anything else than a phone, which is that you scan a QR code EVERY TIME you want to access it from a computer, and you scan the QR code from your phone, so if you have your phone available it defeats the need of using it on your desktop! And don’t be fooled by the keep me signed in button. It does nothing.

3.  Snapchat doesn’t have any way to access it from anything else than a mobile device (like phones and tablets), which isn’t great.

Strides (A Habit Tracker) – Review

Ever since I read a fantastic book called The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg, the process of habit formation has intrigued me and has really become central to my life. It began with Habitica, but soon my needs migrated to Strides, and I’m here to tell you why.

Why not Habitica?

Habitica is fantastic for starting off with habits. As I spoke about in its review here on GingerJumble, it gives you rewards like coins, pets, and XP following once you’ve stuck with your habits. This is great for when you need an external motivator to help you stick with your habits, but eventually I found I didn’t need all the extras Habitica provided me with (and it took too long to load), so I moved to something simpler.

Overcast (A Podcast Player) – Review

This is the final post in the podcasting trilogy here on Gingerjumble.

Go to Part 1 to find out why podcasts are so great in the first place,

In Part 2 I discuss 10 great podcasts to start your podcast journey,

And to find a comprehensive review of one of the best ways to munch up those podcasts keep reading on.

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The final amazing thing about podcasts which I’ve just had to keep for part 3 of this podcasting trilogy is that podcasts are free! That’s right. And I don’t mean free as in you don’t have to pay for them (even though they are) I mean the podcasting megasphere isn’t held down in grey shackles by any corporation or business. The mechanism of which they’re uploaded to the internet means anyone can make there own little app or website to browse and find podcasts, with no corporation *Cough* YouTube *Cough* overbearing on our lovely hosts.

Overcast functions as a ‘podcatcher’, which it collects all the podcasts and puts it inside the sweet little app, so it makes finding, browsing and listening to podcasts a lot more enjoyable.

10 Great Podcasts to Start Your Podcast Journey

Last week I hopefully convinced you (if you weren’t already) why podcasts are so great, and I am 42% certain that the next thought in your head was: “Ok, now what podcasts should I listen to?” Which is why I’ve compiled a list of my 10 favourite podcasts as of right now, which can be your escorts into finding more podcasts yourself.

Two Dudes Talking

I may have passingly mentioned the Two Dudes Talking genre, which is just two people gathering over their mic’s, and talking like they’re best friends (which they usually are) and like they’re sitting on opposite sides of the table (which they usually aren’t). My favourite in this genre is the well-known podcast called:

Podcasts – What are they anyway?

I’m willing to take a bet that right now you are missing out on perhaps the greatest, most versatile form of entertainment out there. I think you’re missing out on perhaps mixing one of your favourite aspects of life into all the mundane necessities. But no more, because in this post, I’m going to pitch the one true form of entertainment to those who have gone there lives missing out. You’re gonna find out the meaning behind the magnificent word, podcast.