Unproductive recreational browsing includes stuff like browsing X/Twitter, reading Hacker News, etc.
Calculated as the average (mean) number of hours spent on unproductive recreational browsing in all weeks between Monday, 23 Jun 2025 and Monday, 22 Sep 2025. Inclusive of the first day and exclusive of the final day. A week is defined here as starting on Monday and ending on Sunday.
I will be tracking time spent on different activities, including recreational browsing, using an Apple Watch app. I have been using this app for a few months now and have found myself to be (in my opinion) consistently accurate/honest about it so far. I commit to not cheat by undercounting or underreporting time spent on browsing, or by any other means. If I have an unprecedented timekeeping failure of some kind such that it's impossible to resolve the market confidently, I will resolve NA.
I will not trade in this market. I commit to posting weekly time tracking updates under this market.
To further incentivize myself to behave, if this market resolves to NO, I commit to donate $50 (US) to an organization/cause chosen by the largest holder of NO shares. If there is a tie I'll do something reasonable, e.g. a fair coin flip between the contenders.
Time spent on this category (unproductive recreational browsing) according to my tracking for the past three calendar weeks:
- 24h44m (week of Jun 9)
- 16h40m (week of Jun 2)
- 14h16m (week of May 26)
1,000People are also trading
week of Jun 30: 16h14m
running average: 14h28m (round to even)
misc notes:
- After seeing an increase this week I've installed Freedom on my phones (h/t @Charlie). The app doesn't work properly on my work phone because a11y permissions are locked down by my employer, so I've disabled the web browser on that phone instead.
- As a general philosophical statement about what I'm trying to do, my goal is to maintain a bounded but nonzero amount of twitter[0] use per week because I do get some utility out of it but the amount of marginal utility drops off quite quickly after I've read all the industry-relevant stuff and start doomscrolling. I've successfully gone cold turkey for extended periods (~months) in the past, but "nonzero but limited" seems much harder to achieve.
- Other measures: I have X blocked on all devices except for a desktop computer in a slightly inconvenient part of my house. I have also set ublock to block the "For You" page and ~exclusively read hand-curated lists.
[0]: I don't really have addiction problems with any other sites or services atm
@Charlie I do use limiters on computers and as a result I basically never browse twitter/etc on laptops or desktops. I’ve found phone limiters to be less effective for various reasons (e.g. most blocker-type apps seem to block things at the app level rather than the site level, so I end up turning them off quite often to look things up and so on).
@ookina_inu I use the Freedom app on my phone, and it locks down a wide range of sites and apps for me. And then I also enabled ScreenTime and let my wife set the unlock password. This was very clutch since it's well integrated and allows reasonable limits. If you don't have someone who could bail you out with an unlock when it's super necessary, I wonder if there would be a way to set a hard-to-remember code that is saved somewhere but annoying to access.
@Charlie very cool, thanks for the pointer. i will look at the app description and update the market if i end up deciding to install it