# An anti-distraction trick

> A quick trick to reveal your own bad habits. Shame yourself in to change!

I fall in to the YouTube or Reddit rabbit-holes sometimes. Not that they're all bad all the time: I love watching a [good music video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ByrKdwQMGYc) with my headphones in. (That track is slow to start but seriously: watch it all the way. I dare you not to love it.)

But being sucked in to Shorts? Lazy-scrolling the Reddit feed? I know that's not how I want to spend my time.

Well it turns out all of these things leave a trace, and you can use that trace to reveal your bad habits. I find this confronting. It causes me to change.

The trick is easy: just open your browser history, and search for the site you don't love.

<JDImage
  folder="blog"
  src="0160A-Safari_history--light-2012x1348.png"
  alt="A screenshot of Safari's history view, with 'YouTube' as the search revealing 571 items."
  width={1006}
  height={674}
  caption="Figure 22.00.0160A. War on Drugs and chickens. Pretty standard."
  noBorder
/>

In Safari, hit **Command+Y** to bring up your history, then type in the search field. Here, I have 571 hits for YouTube. That's okay: most of them are music videos.

But when I did this for Reddit last week, well … shame. So shameful, I deleted them. **Command+A** to select all, then **Delete**. So I can't show them to you.

This is _particularly_ revealing for YouTube Shorts, each one of which leaves a record. I've only binged there once, because seeing that record later was honestly enough for me to have never done it again.

There's your life, scrolling away. Do something better.