I can relate. Big time. My advice would be to identify these two things:
1. What is it that you most enjoy doing online?
2. What is it that you most regret that you are not accomplishing in real life?
Where the two
meet, that I would say is where your focus should be.
Three made-up examples:
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Scenario 1: I go online to chat, download music, and download anime. Then I watch the anime and listen to the music. In real life, I aspire to study Arabic, get a girlfriend, and learn to play the guitar.
Common link: your love of music and the guitar. Convince yourself that you'd rather be the one playing the instrument than the one watching some guy on Youtube do it. "I wish I were him ... hey! I can be him! I will be him!" And go do it. It won't happen overnight, but remind yourself to get offline to go play guitar, and then from guitar maybe try to ween yourself off the computer into the other avenues.
Scenario 2: I go online to discuss porn, download porn, and download video games. On the computer I later watch the porn and transfer the video games to my modded video game consoles. In real life, I aspire to become a writer, to become an accomplished hentai artist, and to learn karate.
Common link: your love of pornography and your desire to learn how to draw hentai. Convince yourself that you want to be the one making the porn instead of downloading it from others who made it themselves. "I'm sick and tired of searching the Internet for obscure porn of video game characters from games nobody likes except me! Fuck it! I want to draw them myself!" Get off the computer and practice drawing for 1 to 2 hours a day. Don't give up. It'll take months. In the mean time while you're working on that goal, maybe a few weeks later you'll be strong enough to ween yourself a little more off the computer to work on writing. "I'm going to practice writing a porn story!" is how you could start off, but then you could say, "You know what, I think I'm ready to try practicing REAL writing!" Once you're disconnected enough from the internet, hopefully the karate will eventually follow. lol But it's the least connected of the three and so is a very poor First Pick. If you try to get out of the PC habit by taking up karate, I don't think it'd work well.
Scenario 3: I go online to read the world news from four different sites. I talk to friends on weblogs, twitter, Facebook, and the like. I e-mail family. I use ICQ to chat with friends in real time. I love chatting!
Common Link: to what? In this case, the person is just an all-around chatty person. But that's not a problem! In fact, it could be a strength! They just have to ask themselves,
what hobbies and/or career skills require talking? and which of these do I want to have under my belt?
Let's say for example this person wishes her vocabulary was much bigger. She could combine her love of chatting with people online with broadening her vocabulary. She could make a game out of it. For example, "Today, I'm not allowed to use a single word which begins with the letters R, L, or S." A simple rule like that forces her to think around her old fallbacks and to use new words which mean the same thing. Instead of "in reality," she has to say "in practice." Instead of saying "silly," she has to say "foolish." And instead of saying "rugged land," she has to say "treacherous terrain."
Let's say she wishes she were more to the point. Ditto. Make it a game: "on ICQ, I'm not allowed to write more than my speaking partner and I'm not allowed to tell them that I'm doing this either."
And before she knows it, her speaking has become more eloquent and refined and who knows? Maybe she can then market that: public ads speaker, politician, writer, preacher, whatever.[/hide]
