An Eye Opening Change For Me

One thing you may or may not know about me is how much time I waste on YouTube.

The answer is an absolute shitload of time.

This has probably been my biggest weakness over the past five years or so. Some people do drugs. Some people drink too much alcohol. Some people gamble. Some people do whatever.

I waste my time on YouTube.

It is my vice.

What do I actually watch on there?

Usually some combination of movie clips, TV show clips, Shorts, long-form videos, random historical facts, and whatever else YouTube decides to put in front of me that day.

YouTube is an interesting one because it is not entirely bad.

You can use it to learn. You can use it to find motivation. You can watch things that genuinely improve your business or your life.

There are definitely times when I use it for those reasons.

The problem is that 90% of the time, or probably more, I am not using it for anything productive.

I am using it as a distraction that provides absolutely no benefit to my life.

In fact, it often has a negative impact because of the time wasted and what it does to my brain. I can go from thinking deeply about how to grow my business to filling my head with nonstop slop about things I did not care about five minutes earlier.

Over the years, I have tried all kinds of things to solve this.

I have used blockers, phone settings, Chrome extensions, VPNs, and other restrictions designed to stop me from accessing YouTube.

Sometimes they worked for a while. Sometimes they did not.

But at the end of the day, I had been trying these things for years and still had the exact same problem.

Whatever I was doing clearly was not working the way I wanted it to.

I became so convinced that short-form content was the problem that I even made an app for it that you can download from the App Store.

The idea was simple.

What if you could open YouTube with all of the short-form content blocked, while still being able to access everything else?

That was better, but it did not solve the actual problem.

Instead of watching short-form brain rot, I would just watch long-form brain rot.

It was the same distraction in a slightly more respectable format.

Then, about three months ago, I accidentally found something that worked better than everything else I had tried.

I did not block YouTube.

I did not delete the app.

I did not set a time limit.

I did not even try to stop myself from using it.

I simply turned off the watch history on my Google account.

Because YouTube could no longer track what I was watching, it stopped giving me a personalized feed.

Now, when I open the YouTube app on my phone or visit the website on my computer, there is basically nothing there.

It tells me that my watch history is turned off.

If I click on a couple of Shorts, it tells me that recommendations are off because YouTube relies on watch history to tailor the feed.

I can open the app all day, every day, and nothing shows up.

Here is the part that was eye-opening for me.

I still open YouTube constantly.

It might be 10, 20, 50, or even 100 times in a day.

But at least 90% of the time, I immediately close it because I literally cannot think of a single thing I want to search for.

That was crazy to me.

It proved that the problem was not really short-form content.

It was not long-form content either.

It was anything.

Whatever the algorithm decided to serve me that day was good enough, as long as it helped me escape or distracted me from the work I did not want to do.

I was not opening YouTube because there was something I wanted to watch.

I was opening YouTube so the algorithm could give me something to want.

Given how much time I have wasted on the platform over the years, that realization was insane to me.

YouTube has always been a much bigger problem for me than every other social media platform combined. It is probably five times worse than Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn put together.

But I still wanted to test the same idea across those platforms.

For those, I used Chrome extensions that removed the feeds, recommendations, Explore pages, and everything else designed to keep me scrolling.

When I opened the sites, I was looking at a mostly blank screen.

I could still search for a specific person, topic, or piece of information if I had a real reason to use the platform.

But otherwise, there was nothing waiting for me.

The result was almost exactly the same.

I would open the platform, stare at the blank screen, realize I had no idea what I was looking for, and close it.

Not a single topic would come to mind.

That is the lesson for me.

A lot of the time, I was not consuming content because I was genuinely interested in it.

I was consuming it because an algorithm had placed an effortless distraction directly in front of me.

The content was not the real problem.

The problem was having an algorithm ready to generate a distraction whenever I wanted to avoid something difficult.

This realization happened in the middle of April.

When I compare my screen time for YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter before and after making these changes, it is down by more than 80%.

I still have access to all of these platforms.

I can use them when I need something for my business. I can search for a specific topic if I want to learn something. I can find a person, video, or piece of information when I have an actual reason to look for it.

What disappeared was the mindless consumption.

I thought I needed to block the platforms completely.

It turned out that I just needed to stop them from constantly giving me reasons to stay.

Once the feed disappeared, so did most of the desire.

If you struggle with the same thing, here are the steps:

You do not necessarily need to remove your ability to use these platforms.

You just need to remove their ability to decide what you consume.

When you have to intentionally search for something, you quickly find out how little you actually wanted to see.