How to block Twitter / X

Why this one is worse for some people than others

For a certain kind of user this is not entertainment, it is an argument machine, and the cost is emotional as much as temporal. Leaving an argument unfinished is uniquely hard to walk away from.

If you notice that your worst sessions are angry rather than bored, a longer cool-down is worth setting. Anger fades more slowly than boredom.

The professional-necessity argument

Sometimes it is genuinely true. Far more often it is the habit finding a respectable justification.

The test is simple: if it is professional, it can happen in a scheduled window during working hours. If it can only happen at midnight, it is not work.

The routes back in that are not the app

This platform is unusual in how many of its doors are somewhere else. Blocking the app and both domains still leaves several, and they are the ones that catch people a fortnight in, when the block is working and the habit starts looking for a gap.

• Embedded posts.News articles quote posts inline, complete with a link into the thread. You did not go there; the article took you.
• The notification emails.Digests of what you are missing, engineered to be interesting, landing in an inbox you have not blocked. Turn them off at the account rather than the device.
• Screenshots on other platforms.Half of the content circulates as images elsewhere. Blocking the source does not block the discourse, and expecting it to leads people to conclude the block failed.
• Logged-out reading.It is easy to convince yourself that browsing without signing in is a different activity. It is the same activity.

What fills the gap

For a lot of people this one is not really a video-and-scroll habit, it is an information habit: a fear of being the last to know. Removing the feed without replacing that leaves a real hole, and the hole is usually what ends the attempt.

The replacement that works is anything with an ending. A newsletter finishes. A newspaper finishes. An hour of the same information arrives in ten minutes and then stops, which the feed will never do because stopping is the one thing it is built not to let you do.

It is also worth naming the withdrawal honestly. The first week is genuinely uncomfortable, and it is disproportionately about the sense that something is happening without you. That feeling fades in roughly a fortnight and almost nobody reports missing anything that mattered.