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You know about rubber duck debugging (wikipedia.org), right?

It’s meant to help you figure out hard problems. But it’s also a half-decent way to get myself working on something I don’t want to do: I talk myself through it out loud (like a lunatic) until I’m actually typing and then I’m often good to go.

But you know what’s ten times more effective? Having an actual human stand in for the duck (which is itself a stand-in for a human, yeah, I know).

On several occasions my wife has been willing to do this to get me unstuck and it was a lifesaver.

(If you’re rich, I guess you can hire people to do this.)

I think the reason this is so powerfully effective is that you’re aware that you’re using up somebody else’s time and it makes that time suddenly very valuable and you can’t help but jump right in and start tackling the worst bits head-on while they’re there.

Bonus: A way to very poorly simulate the guilt-driven power of this incredible waste of time would be my TODO list that is worse than the task. (The only problem is that the only time you’re wasting is your own, which isn’t nearly as effective.)

Even closer to the original "nosurf" theme is this one.

I’ve started using separate computers for different tasks.

I have a separate computer for work.

And then I used my old eeePC for Assembly Nights. What made that so amazingly effective is that I couldn’t surf the Web with it.

(Well, I could and did use Lynx in the terminal to look up some assembly reference stuff occasionally, but it was so much easier to get the info and get back to my task when all of the distractions of the Web weren’t competing for my eyeballs.)

I don’t even want to tell you how many computers I currently have dedicated to specific tasks because it will sound crazy.

But to quote myself from computers-as-workspaces:

Anyway, the work computer has a completely separate browser profile. When I’m on that computer, I’m only allowed to work. No personal email. No shopping. If I suddenly realize I need to order some toilet paper from Amazon, I gotta go to another room and get on another computer to do it.

The general-purpose desktop has the email program and it’s where I buy toilet paper on Amazon. (Also, that one is at a standing desk, so I stand while doing that.)

The microcontroller programming setup is all setup to just do that task.

It wouldn’t stop me from wasting time on those machines. But the device and the space puts me in a different state of mind: I’m there for a purpose.

I just realized there are no less than four links in this post. That’s potentially four tabs you might have opened while reading this. Sorry. Close them.

You’ve read this. That’s all the surfing you need for today.