I found Newport's book to be so surface level for anyone with even a passing familiarity with the problem that it wasn't worth my time.
What really helped me was these two books:
(1) The Attention Merchants by Tim Wu
(2) The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshanna Zuboff
and the nextdns.io installed on all my devices. I literally blocked Reddit, et al to break the cycle of "I just woke up so I'mm scroll until I'm fully awake" and then oops -- an hour went by.
The thing that ended up motivating me to change was reinforcing for myself the fact that I'm in this mess because very smart people have designed systems to exploit me. Fuck that. I'm in control of my attention.
The first thing I did is move my phone out of the bedroom. This helped break the habit of picking it up right away in the morning, and created some friction. I keep it on my desk on a charger.
The second thing I did was decide on a few things I had to do before picking up my phone for the first time in the morning. This like a game, where I started with one thing and then built up more, to see how many things I could get done before checking my messages. I started with taking a shower. Then I added walking the dog, then coffee, then breakfast... now I'm up to the point where my entire morning routine has to happen before I pick up my phone.
It's not easy. I'm not perfect at this, and there are days when I go back to bad habits. (In this context, I use "bad habits" to mean "habits that prevent me achieving the goals I set for myself). That's why I block certain websites still, for myself, to help from getting back into those habits.
What really helped me was these two books:
(1) The Attention Merchants by Tim Wu (2) The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshanna Zuboff
and the nextdns.io installed on all my devices. I literally blocked Reddit, et al to break the cycle of "I just woke up so I'mm scroll until I'm fully awake" and then oops -- an hour went by.
The thing that ended up motivating me to change was reinforcing for myself the fact that I'm in this mess because very smart people have designed systems to exploit me. Fuck that. I'm in control of my attention.