“Rather than fighting my tendency to type these two characters in my omnibar, I neutralized it.”

An interesting short story from Ernie Smith at Tedium, who ventured out to do the opposite of what we usually cover on this blog – disrespect his motor memory: Recently, I made a realization: I have been unwillingly addicted to Facebook for a long time, and it’s not even because I like Facebook. Rather, it’s because I find it an extremely easy URL to type into a modern web browser’s omnibar. This sounds crazy, but the first two letters, f and a, are on the home row, and I don’t really rely on bookmarks, but my browser’s history function to type in URLs. This creates a sort of recency bias. If I type in the same URL a lot, it’s the one that pops up the most. And so, if I’m at a browser with no clear idea of what my intent for the next page I load up, I inevitably type in “fa,” which would suck me in. […] So, what I ended up doing was creating a URL that does nothing but forward to Google News. […] The result is that whenever I type in my new Facebook URL, I go to a news aggregator,…