Keep a list of six things you actually want to see. Pick from it before you sit down, not while sitting down. If nothing on the list appeals tonight, close the app and do something else, which is allowed. The aim here is not less television. It is knowing, at the end of the evening, that you chose what you watched.
The difference between watching and drifting
You already know which one you did last night.
Watching is starting something you meant to start, following it, and remembering it the next day. Drifting is opening the app, scrolling a wall of thumbnails for eleven minutes, starting something because starting something is easier than closing the app, and finishing the evening unable to say what happened in it.
Both can take three hours. Only one of them is a hobby.
This is the distinction the research keeps pointing at without quite naming. A 2022 study found that "trouble-free binge-watchers shared little to no similarity with problematic binge-watchers, therefore supporting the need to differentiate these two behaviours". Two people, same eight hours, doing entirely different things. Hours do not separate them. Intention comes a lot closer.
And a 2017 focus group study found people describing their binge-watching as context dependent, while all of them "agreed having trouble recognizing themselves as truly being an 'addict'". If the behaviour rides on context, the useful lever is the context, not a label and not a ban.
The list
This is the whole method and it takes about ten minutes to set up.
**Write six things you genuinely want to watch.** Films, series, a documentary somebody recommended, the thing you have been meaning to get to for a year. Six is enough to have a choice and few enough to actually read.
Keep it in your phone's notes, or on paper by the television. Not inside the streaming app, because opening the app is the thing you are trying to avoid doing undecided.
**Add to it during the week, never in the evening.** When somebody mentions something, it goes on the list. The list gets built at lunchtime, in a queue, on a train. Never at nine o'clock with the remote in your hand.
**Pick from the list before you sit down.** Not while browsing. Decide at lunchtime, or on the way home, or in the ten minutes before you put the telly on. Then the evening is collecting something you chose rather than shopping while tired.
**If nothing on the list appeals, close the app.** This is the rule people find hardest and it is the one that does the most. If the honest answer is that you do not want to watch any of the six things you wanted to watch, then you do not want to watch television tonight, you want to not be alone with the evening. Those are different needs and the second one has a better answer. [The ten second question](/guides/streaming/what-you-are-avoiding-when-you-press-play) is the piece for that.
Two rules that make the list work
**Nothing starts that was not decided.** Not a strict moral rule, a practical one. Anything you begin without having chosen it in advance is drift by definition, and it is where the lost evenings live.
**One screen.** If the phone is in your hand, you are not really watching. The plot moves while you scroll, the episode ends feeling unfinished, so you start another one to get the feeling of having watched something. A lot of people who think they have an attention problem simply have a phone problem, and one evening with the phone in another room settles the question.
The browse wall is not neutral
Worth knowing why "I'll just see what's on" costs so much of an evening.
The front page is not a static menu. Previews play at you with sound. The most prominent row resumes something you already started. The artwork is chosen for you and the rows are ordered for you. None of that is sinister, it is what a subscription service is for, and it does mean that "nothing looks good tonight" and "the wall has been arranged so that things look good tonight" are different experiences.
The practical response is the list, plus turning off the second autoplay switch, which stops previews playing while you browse. Most people know about the first switch and not the second. [The settings worth changing](/guides/streaming/autoplay-and-the-settings-that-matter) has both, along with the sleep timer that does more work than either.
What this is not
It is not a plan to watch less television, and it is worth saying so plainly, because most advice in this area has an unstated goal of getting you to a smaller number.
There is no agreed clinical definition of problematic binge-watching, no threshold to fall below, and no evidence that a particular number of hours is the right one. The UK Chief Medical Officers say the research is "insufficiently conclusive to support UK CMO evidence-based guidelines on optimal amounts of screen use", which means nobody, including us, can tell you what your number should be.
What tends to happen when people watch deliberately is that the total falls anyway, because a lot of the hours were drift rather than pleasure. That is a side effect and not the target. If you choose four episodes on a Saturday, from your list, on purpose, and enjoy them, then the method worked exactly as intended.
The one part with real evidence attached is sleep, and it is the part worth protecting whatever your total looks like. Getting the nights back is [its own piece](/guides/streaming/sleep-debt-and-how-to-pay-it-back), and it works better than any rule about episodes.
Common questions
**How do I stop scrolling and just pick something?** Decide before you open the app. Keep a list of six things you actually want to watch, built during the week rather than in the evening, and choose from it while you are still standing up.
**Is it bad to watch a lot of television?** Not inherently, and there is no agreed threshold anywhere. The research found that people who binge-watch without trouble look almost nothing like people who binge-watch problematically, so the total is a poor measure. What it displaces, particularly sleep, is a much better one.
**Why do I feel worse after a big watching session?** Often because it was drift rather than choice. Time that you chose to spend tends to feel spent; time that passed while you were scrolling tends to feel taken. The same three hours can produce either feeling.
**What if nothing on my list appeals?** Close the app. That is the useful information in the whole method: wanting to watch nothing in particular usually means you want the television for something other than watching, and that is worth knowing rather than overriding.
Sources
- [Negative Affect and Problematic Binge-Watching, 2022](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36246519/). That trouble-free binge-watchers differ from problematic ones, and that problematic binge-watching remains ill-defined.
- [Toward a qualitative understanding of binge-watching behaviors, 2017](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29025269/). Context dependency, and participants not recognising themselves in addiction language.
- [UK Chief Medical Officers' commentary on screen-based activities, 2019](https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/uk-cmo-commentary-on-screen-time-and-social-media-map-of-reviews). That the research is insufficiently conclusive to support guidelines on optimal amounts of screen use.
