that haiku he wrote was clearly about me: the “wind over the plain” is obviously about rice fields and what grows in rice fields? JASMINE rice. But suddenly this gif of a pigeon saluting Vladmir Putin was HYSTERICAL and scrolling through my ex’s poetry blog seemed like a great use of time for a Tuesday afternoon. Sure, I hadn’t been on Tumblr in 6 months and had retained all of 14 followers, probably my friends from the early aughts. I knew I hit rock bottom when I started actually reading BU Today! Even worse: the day after I deleted Facebook from my phone, I found myself digging up my Tumblr password. When I did an official moratorium on all social media around my prospectus defense, checking email suddenly became a very fun, time consuming, daylong engagement. In my experience, if I silence my Facebook timeline with a browser extension, suddenly all the others social media sites are suspiciously flooded with never-before-noticed, engaging content! This is true of email too, the most insidious trickster of them all. Rule 2: Practice good habits ubiquitously across the internet. I go to Facebook, see a blank timeline, acknowledge some notifications (mostly my aunts volunteering me for things I definitely do not want to do), then navigate away and – just like that– back to work. So anyway, the News Feed Eradicator has done wonders for me. But that pesky Facebook newsfeed really distracts me with its perfectly crafted algorithms showcasing news articles with just my flavor of liberalism, graduation announcements, engagement photos, and pictures of The Dress that make polite conversations devolve into arguments about visual psychophysics (which I then convince myself is technically work ). I’m very close to my family and god-siblings so it is actually a priority for me. As a card-carrying extrovert, I want to stay in the loop of my picture and status tags, event invites, timeline posts, and birthdays on Facebook. Many people praise StayFocused, RescueTime, or other productivity apps like the Pomodoro technique, but the one that really works for me is called News Feed Eradicator for Facebook. Rule 1: Use browser extensions and apps to limit your social media time. SO here I’d like to outline a few things you might encounter as a grad student with a screen addiction (and maybe an undiagnosed attention problem) like me, and a few tactics to help yourself: some serious, some just worth a thought. As I’m writing this, I am actively fantasizing about all the likes I’ll get when I post this blog link to my Facebook or one of my three twitter accounts! #AllTheLikes #JazzTheWriter #SoProfresh #GradSchoolLulz. No – I am talking about my social media and internet addiction. I’m not talking about actively ruining staples of American Culture or slowly grinding the gears of every Baby Boomer I know (my lovely parents and PI included) or even amassing soul-crushing student debt. But like every graduate student threatened by a looming prospectus defense deadline, I too have fallen victim to the most destructive of our Millennial Failings™.

Now I’m in a set pattern, running up to 6 hours of experiments per week and the rest of the time is spent with just me, myself, and my trusty MacBook Pro.

When I joined the PhD program at BU, I switched from working in a wet lab (where I spent most of my days praying that my cells would live to see another day) to a mostly computational group. Life Hacks for a Screen Addicted Grad Student

Apps to stop internet addiction for mac