7 ms·

I check websites obsessively, over and over. Same sites. I'm really wasting my life. Toying with getting a dumbphone... I think I owe that to my kids.

cellularmitosis 9y ago
I've been struggling a lot with this lately. The thing is, there are a lot of digital things I _do_ want to accomplish / master / etc, but the feeds are the easier reach, and I go with what's at hand when I am low on energy (or worse, when I'm unhappy with my life). I have an idea that putting some effort into making the things I _want_ to accomplish (e.g. another MOOC course) more readily accessible might make it easier to form a habit around consuming what I _want_, rather than mental candy.
- rtpg 9y ago
  tips for doing so: https://heyfocus.com/ https://heyfocus.com/ <-- Focus, lets you block sites. Start out just blocking everything from 9AM to 9PM stay logged out of websites. Every time you want to use a site you should have to log in https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/history-autodelete/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/history-autod... <-- this website will let you block things from your history. This prevents the "type n -> press down -> press enter to get to hacker news". I'm typing this here so it's not 100% effective but I've found that after going sessions cold turkey I start to stop caring about the churn of news (especially for twitter). Prune people you follow on social media. Especially high volume posts/low effort stuff. Not worth it. I've found that using RSS feeds help a bit because you can only look at something once. No "purple link syndrome". Good luck, I'm still struggling but I feel much more in control of my life compared to even 3 months ago after getting burned out like we all are. Especially from political twitter (just read the news on a normal website, it's fine to be 6 hours behind).
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - michaelbazos 9y ago
    "type n -> press down -> press enter to get to hacker news". It's even shorter as you can skip the "press down" step. At least in Chrome and Firefox.
GuiA 9y ago
Time is your most scarce resource, and everything is competing for it. In that light, it makes sense to purposefully pare down your environment to better align what you want to spend your time on, and what the objects around you tempt you to actually spend your time on. I replaced having a laptop on my desk at home with a typewriter. Now when I sit at my desk, instead of spending an hour mindlessly browsing reddit like I used to, I write. My friends make fun of me, but I have written 10x more in the past month than any of them have. I have used this approach with great success for other things I wished to prioritize more. For instance, I am purposefully not replacing my broken-screened-taped-up iPhone because I want to constantly be reminded that I probably shouldn’t be looking at it. Remove everything from your environment (TV, video games, social media feeds, junk food, etc), and only add things back in deliberately. In the attention economy, being deliberate with your attention is the best thing you can do for yourself.
kakarot 9y ago
Me too. It's an instinctive response for the physical symptoms of depression. The moment my hands are idle the feeling starts creeping back in until I'm having intrusive thoughts of suicide. I understand well the existential problems that exacerbate my depression, like the sense of disconnection from society or that of loneliness, both temporarily relieved by scrolling through feeds and forums for various reasons. It's an interesting phenomenon to be sure. When I am in my manic phase, I may go for weeks without talking to anyone online or rabidly consuming news or keeping a close eye on politics, but while phasing back into depression I will feel the compulsive urge to read news and talk about stuff online grow stronger and stronger. Like some sort of tic. I deleted Facebook at the beginning of the year and it's helped my mood tremendously. I still get frightful bouts of loneliness and almost painful urges to talk to people when I'm feeling especially down, but I'm no longer self-medicating with the opiate that is social media and thus these feelings are compact and brief. I don't feel strung out on self-administered dopamine all day. tl;dr delete facebook
- hoodoof 9y ago
  An increasing urge is building to ditch as much tech as possible out of the home. Possibly all except the dumbphone, including the TV. I cannot say it's built to the point of action, but there's some compelling arguments for doing so.
  - dvtv75 9y ago
    It's interesting that you say this. I'm watching the first season of Stranger Things just now, and am finding myself longing for my home of the early 1980s, without computers, just a radio and TV, and my bike. I'm also finding that I'm reloading HN a few times a day (honestly close to 30) in the hope of forgetting that I'm alive while I find something else interesting to read.
  - daxorid 9y ago
    It's 2017, and in the current sociopolitical milieu, it may be regarded as "abuse" to unilaterally remove television from the home against the wishes of your spouse and/or kids. I would love to do this as well, as I harbor an abiding hatred for the passive entertainment industry in general. But it's often not worth the relationship cost.
michaelchisari 9y ago
For two years, I had a dumb phone for when I was on the go and an Ipad I left at home for apps when I had the time to indulge. It was a good experience, I recommend it and I intend to do it again soon.
apatters 9y ago
Use an RSS client and curate your own feed. Most of the problem lies in when we let someone else curate our feeds for us. Invariably they turn us into pigs slopping at a trough in the name of "engagement." I uninstalled Facebook and started following a small number of websites via RSS. I became somewhat addicted to following my own feed, but it's got a better signal to noise ratio and since I curate it tightly it's not an infinite time waste -- there are only a few new items every time I check. It's like replacing the potato chips you keep in your pantry with some mixed nuts. Sure there's still some fat in there, but no one designed your snack to trick your brain into endless consumption, next thing you know you've actually lost a couple pounds. Facebook still gets maybe 15min of my time per day when I consciously choose to surf to it. More if I decide I want to post something. But I probably spend 500% less time checking feeds overall.
- afandian 9y ago
  I've been looking for scholarly RSS feeds for a service I'm building (https://www.crossref.org/services/event-data/ https://www.crossref.org/services/event-data/). Most sites still seem to have them. But a few are going facebook-only or twitter-only for feed syndication. It's a worrying hint that content providers are starting to forget about the DIY approach to feed consumption toward homogenised, gate-kept ones.
  - dredmorbius 9y ago
    Contact those sources directly and tell them this. Direct feedback matters. I'd also strongly recommend a fair bit of (even-handed) public commentary. I've had fairly good results with this. A CBC programme ("Ideas" with Paul Kennedy) had blocked "commercial" podcast apps from using it. I groused, got a few Canadian news outlets to pick this up, and the feeds were restored after a few months. I'm working with the creator of the Online Etymology Dictionary over some recent site redesign, and that looks like it may be positive. Not all sites are similarly responsive, and I've also ... on occasion ... been somewhat less than gentle in my criticisms (most especially with Google). But really, do make the mention.
- jasonthevillain 9y ago
stinos 9y ago
Only ever having had a dumbphone I can tell you it might not be the complete solution: checking websites obsessively works just as well, if not better, on a computer (or similar, assuming you have one). Which I unfortunately know from both first-hand and second-hand experience. I'm no stranger to this behaviour, and I know at least one guy wo ditched his smartphone only to find himself to transfer the behaviour to his other computing devices. So you might find that, unless you really deal with that obsessiveness itself, your mind will always find a way to submit to it no matter what the medium is. Though obviously the smarthpone is #1 when it comes to enabling such pretty erratic behaviour.
- bob_theslob646 9y ago
  How did you stop?
  - lloeki 9y ago
    The trick is to tackle the issue, not try and sidestep it. When you quit smoking, removing stuff like lighters from view and access is a good thing to do, but it's not the hiding that makes you stop craving. You have to be hellbent on cracking down on the behaviour, take some perspective and discover why you're indulging in this, without pretence. It's a fight, sure, but it's also a journey at knowing yourself better.
    - jonnycomputer 9y ago
      I quite smoking just before Obama was elected. It was hard. I put up gruesome images of smoking-related diseases as my desktop backgrounds and screen-savers. It probably contributed some small amount to successfully kicking the habit. Guess you could post pictures of smart phone zombies
    - tertius 9y ago
      A extreme minority of people are brave enough to do introspection and gather some self-awareness. But I do agree, this is a large part of the solution.
  - 9y ago
lordnacho 9y ago
I had this problem. Solution was to install a Chrome extension called "StayFocusd" and really lock down what it allows me to look at. Only sites that are work related: mail, all the local web consoles (Jenkins) that I use, stackoverflow and friends, and websites containing "Cpp" or "python", and a few other keywords. Wikipedia for entertainment. It's complex enough that it's like reading a school textbook: your mind gets tired from reading about the war of the Spanish succession, and decides to go back to work. Everything else I give 3 minutes a day to, within the working day. So if I show up early or work late, I can browse a bit, but the 3 minutes can be used on random sites I need (say someone emails me some form I have to fill out). I also use "TimeYourWeb" to show me what I looked at, and it's much better since I did this. Normally I didn't waste all day reading, but now and again I'd run into some interesting long-form article with associated links. Now you might think 3 minutes is too little and I'd then cheat and go on Safari or my phone. Which I do, especially for Facebook. But I generally use FB to tell my friends I'm still alive by liking their articles. The articles linked from there are either things I've already read because they're all over the news that day, or not very interesting. I also find the leap of having to copy-paste a link to Safari is enough to stop me doing it for most things, when I would have just clicked through on my main browser.
- aorth 9y ago
  > I had this problem. Solution was to install a Chrome extension called "StayFocusd" and really lock down what it allows me to look at. Good idea. I just did a search and found something similar, but with a twist, for Firefox: Forest. Seems to be trading addiction for gamification / reward of growing a virtual tree. :P https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/forest-stay-focused-be-present/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/forest-stay-f...
  - FrozenCow 9y ago
    I have used the app variant. It's kind of fun to see progress by planting bigger and bigger trees in a forest. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cc.forestapp https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cc.forestapp
- 9y ago
Joeri 9y ago
I have information addiction myself. I’ve had websites I check compulsively ever since slashdot first became popular. When it becomes a real problem I take action. I’ve only found two things to work: complete cold turkey with a specific end date (personal challenge) or subsituting site checking with activities I enjoy more (reading books, playing games, ...). I’ve never been able to subsitute with something more productive that I enjoyed less, I just end up procrastinating in other ways. The remarkable thing about going cold turkey: you don’t miss out on anything important. Everything truly important will reach you another way. For me, checking news sites is not about getting useful information, it’s about rewarding my brain by feeding it what it has been trained to want. In my experience it took weeks to deprogram myself.
- jonnycomputer 9y ago
  At one point I started listening to several news podcasts simultaneously... News addiction is sort of a problem, especially because we often don't really drill down into the content, but just scan the lead, get the gist, peek at the comments, move on. But most daily news is provisional, and not well developed. Weekly or even monthly publications like Newsweek and the Economist may not be a model suited to the internet age, yet it seems a model that consumers desperately need to increase the SNR.
avip 9y ago
2 simple tricks work for me: 1. Only use HN to consume "tech news" - loads fast, has no ads, content averages @good+. Then turn on noproc. 2. Set time of day u close laptop+phone+(enter any other device, fridge is excluded). For me it's 18:00.
jen729w 9y ago
You don’t need a dumbphone. You just need to make the phone you have dumb. I did this two weeks ago and it’s working for me: 1. Take Safari and the App Store off your phone. If you have an iPhone, you can do that with Restrictions. 2. Move everything off your home screen. Minimise the icons on your Dock. (Mine has Messages and OmniFocus.) 3. This sounds crazy, and probably isn’t necessary, but to make your phone boring - make it greyscale! Accessibility, Display Accommodations, Colour Filters. I look at my phone waaaaay less than I used to because it simply doesn’t do anything. It should go without saying that Twitter isn’t on there. I don’t use Facebook. My leisure time device - the one I’m on now - is my iPad. It’s a conscious choice to use this device; when I pick it up, I know I’m “just browsing crap”.
- oddlyaromatic 9y ago
  I use grayscale when I'm finding I'm too distracted by all the stuff on my phone or computer. It helps me focus on what I'm doing sometimes and is a visual reminder that, for whatever reason, I need to try harder than usual to avid distractions that day. This has been a little trickier since I have started programming more. I really like syntax highlighting.
  - terminalcommand 9y ago
    Another solution to this problem could be opening seperate users on the computer. One for serious work, one for leisure. One could probably block facebook, hn, news sites, etc. on the work user, and only have files and programs related to work.
    - pault 9y ago
      This is a fantastic idea. I'm going to try this tomorrow.
    - ashark 9y ago
      I really want switchable, individually suspendable workspaces as an OS feature. A workspace for each development project, one for each writing/research task, one for time-wasting browsing, one for gaming, and so on.
amiga-workbench 9y ago
I bought a Nokia 216 and cut myself off completely. I revived a long dead habit of manually checking my email once a day (and only once), in addition to that I was no longer permanently online on my various Instant Messengers. I was at my worst when I had a Smartwatch, the damn thing bleeting at me, along with my phone, laptop and computer in succession was beyond irritating.
KGIII 9y ago
Can you get away with carrying no phone? If you can, it is a weight lifted off my shoulders and might be the same for you. My time belongs to me. I'll see the missed call message and call you back when I have time. It's hard to describe the feeling. It feels a bit like that time when I was finally caught and punished for doing something wrong, just a huge sense of relief.
- chiefofgxbxl 9y ago
  I agree. Obviously in today's world it seems difficult to not carry a phone. But I used to do this in college and it was marvelously liberating. I'd recommend two stages: 1. Remove your phone from your person, but still keep it with you. I.e. if you carry a backpack/purse/whatever, put your phone in there rather than in one of your pant pockets. 2. For small tasks, leave your phone in your room. Obviously more difficult than the first item. In college when my friends and I would go to the servery to get dinner, I would leave my phone in my dorm room. This is truly immersive because it gives you no possibility of even wanting to use it when you are enjoying the time you are spending with the people physically present with you. (Again... clearly more difficult in our world today, but look for small opportunities; going to a coffee shop with a friend? Leave the phone in your car's glove compartment for that 20min coffee break.)
dominotw 9y ago
blocking the site in /etc/hosts helped me a lot. I 've given up medium, reddit, all news sites. I add a site to /etc/hosts as soon as I feel like i am spending too much time on it. Interesting comment about 'owing it my kids' , I always felt like I am whiling my life away because I don't have kids and hence don't feel like taking like seriously. If I don't have kids, what am I striving for ?
- pault 9y ago
  Good question. A sense of accomplishment is a small pleasure, but it scales better than activities that provide high highs but inevitable low lows. Most people have an emotional equilibrium state; stresses and rewards can temporarily move the needle, but it tends to return to center regardless of the circumstance. Given that a lifetime of low-effort activity tends to limit opportunities for broadening your horizons and doesn't have a lasting contribution to happiness, a simple cost-benefit analysis indicates that dedication to personal growth is the best value for time spent. Ultimately, life only has the meaning you assign to it, so if you're optimizing for pleasure, learning and creative pursuits hold the most potential.
- dredmorbius 9y ago
  I have a large set of sites blocked at the router via dnsmasq, which scales well. (It also means my unrooted mobile device ... doesn't have such protections when it's outside the Mothership.)
gm-conspiracy 9y ago
Which sites lure you in?
nickjj 9y ago
I had this problem for a while. The good old social loop of death. A non-smartphone won't fix it. I think fixing this problem begins with you asking yourself why you're doing this. Are you procrastinating over doing something else? Are you passing time because you don't have anything else to do? Etc..
abootstrapper 9y ago
Delete your accounts. It's worth it.
- ringaroundthetx 9y ago
  "But muhhh faaaamily is on Facebook" scary dystopia they're addicted to
wpietri 9y ago
Say, could you say more about the exact pattern of how you do this? I've noticed that I have a few "distraction" sites that I'll visit. And then when I hit the end, I'll loop back in hopes of another hit of novelty. What strikes me is how ingrained it is; if I'm not careful I'll find myself on, e.g., Facebook, with no conscious intent. I've even caught myself having a feeling of boredom with what I'm looking at and typing "facebook.com" in the address bar while I'm on Facebook. Is this familiar? I ask because I'm thinking of building a WebExtension to notice and interrupt this cycle, so that I have to consciously want to use a distraction site. But I'm not sure how big the audience is.
- eropple 9y ago
  This, me, all the time. I would use such an extension.
- tertius 9y ago
  I use news feed eradicator with Facebook. It has solved it for me.
sliverstorm 9y ago
Rather than a dumbphone, which doesn't support actually-useful things like managing my calendar, notes, grocery lists, etc. I picked up a 2.4" android phone, on the theory that it will be annoying to browse, type, etc so I will only use it for useful things and not leisure. It seems to accomplish those goals, and as a kicker it has great battery life only when the screen is off... Just have to commit and port my number now. Sadly none of the tiny Android phones support Verizon.
jcims 9y ago
If you're thinking this now, do something about it now. I'm two years from empty nesting and can't fix the things I didn't do. All I can do is say that you won't be able to either if you wait until it's too late.
- tertius 9y ago
  Give us a list of things that we should stop doing today. I have a one year old.

cellularmitosis 9y ago

I've been struggling a lot with this lately. The thing is, there are a lot of digital things I _do_ want to accomplish / master / etc, but the feeds are the easier reach, and I go with what's at hand when I am low on energy (or worse, when I'm unhappy with my life). I have an idea that putting some effort into making the things I _want_ to accomplish (e.g. another MOOC course) more readily accessible might make it easier to form a habit around consuming what I _want_, rather than mental candy.

rtpg 9y ago
tips for doing so: https://heyfocus.com/ https://heyfocus.com/ <-- Focus, lets you block sites. Start out just blocking everything from 9AM to 9PM stay logged out of websites. Every time you want to use a site you should have to log in https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/history-autodelete/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/history-autod... <-- this website will let you block things from your history. This prevents the "type n -> press down -> press enter to get to hacker news". I'm typing this here so it's not 100% effective but I've found that after going sessions cold turkey I start to stop caring about the churn of news (especially for twitter). Prune people you follow on social media. Especially high volume posts/low effort stuff. Not worth it. I've found that using RSS feeds help a bit because you can only look at something once. No "purple link syndrome". Good luck, I'm still struggling but I feel much more in control of my life compared to even 3 months ago after getting burned out like we all are. Especially from political twitter (just read the news on a normal website, it's fine to be 6 hours behind).
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- michaelbazos 9y ago
  "type n -> press down -> press enter to get to hacker news". It's even shorter as you can skip the "press down" step. At least in Chrome and Firefox.

GuiA 9y ago

Time is your most scarce resource, and everything is competing for it. In that light, it makes sense to purposefully pare down your environment to better align what you want to spend your time on, and what the objects around you tempt you to actually spend your time on. I replaced having a laptop on my desk at home with a typewriter. Now when I sit at my desk, instead of spending an hour mindlessly browsing reddit like I used to, I write. My friends make fun of me, but I have written 10x more in the past month than any of them have. I have used this approach with great success for other things I wished to prioritize more. For instance, I am purposefully not replacing my broken-screened-taped-up iPhone because I want to constantly be reminded that I probably shouldn’t be looking at it. Remove everything from your environment (TV, video games, social media feeds, junk food, etc), and only add things back in deliberately. In the attention economy, being deliberate with your attention is the best thing you can do for yourself.

kakarot 9y ago

Me too. It's an instinctive response for the physical symptoms of depression. The moment my hands are idle the feeling starts creeping back in until I'm having intrusive thoughts of suicide. I understand well the existential problems that exacerbate my depression, like the sense of disconnection from society or that of loneliness, both temporarily relieved by scrolling through feeds and forums for various reasons. It's an interesting phenomenon to be sure. When I am in my manic phase, I may go for weeks without talking to anyone online or rabidly consuming news or keeping a close eye on politics, but while phasing back into depression I will feel the compulsive urge to read news and talk about stuff online grow stronger and stronger. Like some sort of tic. I deleted Facebook at the beginning of the year and it's helped my mood tremendously. I still get frightful bouts of loneliness and almost painful urges to talk to people when I'm feeling especially down, but I'm no longer self-medicating with the opiate that is social media and thus these feelings are compact and brief. I don't feel strung out on self-administered dopamine all day. tl;dr delete facebook

hoodoof 9y ago
An increasing urge is building to ditch as much tech as possible out of the home. Possibly all except the dumbphone, including the TV. I cannot say it's built to the point of action, but there's some compelling arguments for doing so.
- dvtv75 9y ago
  It's interesting that you say this. I'm watching the first season of Stranger Things just now, and am finding myself longing for my home of the early 1980s, without computers, just a radio and TV, and my bike. I'm also finding that I'm reloading HN a few times a day (honestly close to 30) in the hope of forgetting that I'm alive while I find something else interesting to read.
- daxorid 9y ago
  It's 2017, and in the current sociopolitical milieu, it may be regarded as "abuse" to unilaterally remove television from the home against the wishes of your spouse and/or kids. I would love to do this as well, as I harbor an abiding hatred for the passive entertainment industry in general. But it's often not worth the relationship cost.

michaelchisari 9y ago

For two years, I had a dumb phone for when I was on the go and an Ipad I left at home for apps when I had the time to indulge. It was a good experience, I recommend it and I intend to do it again soon.

apatters 9y ago

Use an RSS client and curate your own feed. Most of the problem lies in when we let someone else curate our feeds for us. Invariably they turn us into pigs slopping at a trough in the name of "engagement." I uninstalled Facebook and started following a small number of websites via RSS. I became somewhat addicted to following my own feed, but it's got a better signal to noise ratio and since I curate it tightly it's not an infinite time waste -- there are only a few new items every time I check. It's like replacing the potato chips you keep in your pantry with some mixed nuts. Sure there's still some fat in there, but no one designed your snack to trick your brain into endless consumption, next thing you know you've actually lost a couple pounds. Facebook still gets maybe 15min of my time per day when I consciously choose to surf to it. More if I decide I want to post something. But I probably spend 500% less time checking feeds overall.

afandian 9y ago
I've been looking for scholarly RSS feeds for a service I'm building (https://www.crossref.org/services/event-data/ https://www.crossref.org/services/event-data/). Most sites still seem to have them. But a few are going facebook-only or twitter-only for feed syndication. It's a worrying hint that content providers are starting to forget about the DIY approach to feed consumption toward homogenised, gate-kept ones.
- dredmorbius 9y ago
  Contact those sources directly and tell them this. Direct feedback matters. I'd also strongly recommend a fair bit of (even-handed) public commentary. I've had fairly good results with this. A CBC programme ("Ideas" with Paul Kennedy) had blocked "commercial" podcast apps from using it. I groused, got a few Canadian news outlets to pick this up, and the feeds were restored after a few months. I'm working with the creator of the Online Etymology Dictionary over some recent site redesign, and that looks like it may be positive. Not all sites are similarly responsive, and I've also ... on occasion ... been somewhat less than gentle in my criticisms (most especially with Google). But really, do make the mention.
jasonthevillain 9y ago

stinos 9y ago

Only ever having had a dumbphone I can tell you it might not be the complete solution: checking websites obsessively works just as well, if not better, on a computer (or similar, assuming you have one). Which I unfortunately know from both first-hand and second-hand experience. I'm no stranger to this behaviour, and I know at least one guy wo ditched his smartphone only to find himself to transfer the behaviour to his other computing devices. So you might find that, unless you really deal with that obsessiveness itself, your mind will always find a way to submit to it no matter what the medium is. Though obviously the smarthpone is #1 when it comes to enabling such pretty erratic behaviour.

bob_theslob646 9y ago
How did you stop?
- lloeki 9y ago
  The trick is to tackle the issue, not try and sidestep it. When you quit smoking, removing stuff like lighters from view and access is a good thing to do, but it's not the hiding that makes you stop craving. You have to be hellbent on cracking down on the behaviour, take some perspective and discover why you're indulging in this, without pretence. It's a fight, sure, but it's also a journey at knowing yourself better.
  - jonnycomputer 9y ago
    I quite smoking just before Obama was elected. It was hard. I put up gruesome images of smoking-related diseases as my desktop backgrounds and screen-savers. It probably contributed some small amount to successfully kicking the habit. Guess you could post pictures of smart phone zombies
  - tertius 9y ago
    A extreme minority of people are brave enough to do introspection and gather some self-awareness. But I do agree, this is a large part of the solution.
- 9y ago

lordnacho 9y ago

I had this problem. Solution was to install a Chrome extension called "StayFocusd" and really lock down what it allows me to look at. Only sites that are work related: mail, all the local web consoles (Jenkins) that I use, stackoverflow and friends, and websites containing "Cpp" or "python", and a few other keywords. Wikipedia for entertainment. It's complex enough that it's like reading a school textbook: your mind gets tired from reading about the war of the Spanish succession, and decides to go back to work. Everything else I give 3 minutes a day to, within the working day. So if I show up early or work late, I can browse a bit, but the 3 minutes can be used on random sites I need (say someone emails me some form I have to fill out). I also use "TimeYourWeb" to show me what I looked at, and it's much better since I did this. Normally I didn't waste all day reading, but now and again I'd run into some interesting long-form article with associated links. Now you might think 3 minutes is too little and I'd then cheat and go on Safari or my phone. Which I do, especially for Facebook. But I generally use FB to tell my friends I'm still alive by liking their articles. The articles linked from there are either things I've already read because they're all over the news that day, or not very interesting. I also find the leap of having to copy-paste a link to Safari is enough to stop me doing it for most things, when I would have just clicked through on my main browser.

aorth 9y ago
> I had this problem. Solution was to install a Chrome extension called "StayFocusd" and really lock down what it allows me to look at. Good idea. I just did a search and found something similar, but with a twist, for Firefox: Forest. Seems to be trading addiction for gamification / reward of growing a virtual tree. :P https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/forest-stay-focused-be-present/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/forest-stay-f...
- FrozenCow 9y ago
  I have used the app variant. It's kind of fun to see progress by planting bigger and bigger trees in a forest. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cc.forestapp https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cc.forestapp
9y ago

Joeri 9y ago

I have information addiction myself. I’ve had websites I check compulsively ever since slashdot first became popular. When it becomes a real problem I take action. I’ve only found two things to work: complete cold turkey with a specific end date (personal challenge) or subsituting site checking with activities I enjoy more (reading books, playing games, ...). I’ve never been able to subsitute with something more productive that I enjoyed less, I just end up procrastinating in other ways. The remarkable thing about going cold turkey: you don’t miss out on anything important. Everything truly important will reach you another way. For me, checking news sites is not about getting useful information, it’s about rewarding my brain by feeding it what it has been trained to want. In my experience it took weeks to deprogram myself.

jonnycomputer 9y ago
At one point I started listening to several news podcasts simultaneously... News addiction is sort of a problem, especially because we often don't really drill down into the content, but just scan the lead, get the gist, peek at the comments, move on. But most daily news is provisional, and not well developed. Weekly or even monthly publications like Newsweek and the Economist may not be a model suited to the internet age, yet it seems a model that consumers desperately need to increase the SNR.

avip 9y ago

2 simple tricks work for me: 1. Only use HN to consume "tech news" - loads fast, has no ads, content averages @good+. Then turn on noproc. 2. Set time of day u close laptop+phone+(enter any other device, fridge is excluded). For me it's 18:00.

jen729w 9y ago

You don’t need a dumbphone. You just need to make the phone you have dumb. I did this two weeks ago and it’s working for me: 1. Take Safari and the App Store off your phone. If you have an iPhone, you can do that with Restrictions. 2. Move everything off your home screen. Minimise the icons on your Dock. (Mine has Messages and OmniFocus.) 3. This sounds crazy, and probably isn’t necessary, but to make your phone boring - make it greyscale! Accessibility, Display Accommodations, Colour Filters. I look at my phone waaaaay less than I used to because it simply doesn’t do anything. It should go without saying that Twitter isn’t on there. I don’t use Facebook. My leisure time device - the one I’m on now - is my iPad. It’s a conscious choice to use this device; when I pick it up, I know I’m “just browsing crap”.

oddlyaromatic 9y ago
I use grayscale when I'm finding I'm too distracted by all the stuff on my phone or computer. It helps me focus on what I'm doing sometimes and is a visual reminder that, for whatever reason, I need to try harder than usual to avid distractions that day. This has been a little trickier since I have started programming more. I really like syntax highlighting.
- terminalcommand 9y ago
  Another solution to this problem could be opening seperate users on the computer. One for serious work, one for leisure. One could probably block facebook, hn, news sites, etc. on the work user, and only have files and programs related to work.
  - pault 9y ago
    This is a fantastic idea. I'm going to try this tomorrow.
  - ashark 9y ago
    I really want switchable, individually suspendable workspaces as an OS feature. A workspace for each development project, one for each writing/research task, one for time-wasting browsing, one for gaming, and so on.

amiga-workbench 9y ago

I bought a Nokia 216 and cut myself off completely. I revived a long dead habit of manually checking my email once a day (and only once), in addition to that I was no longer permanently online on my various Instant Messengers. I was at my worst when I had a Smartwatch, the damn thing bleeting at me, along with my phone, laptop and computer in succession was beyond irritating.

KGIII 9y ago

Can you get away with carrying no phone? If you can, it is a weight lifted off my shoulders and might be the same for you. My time belongs to me. I'll see the missed call message and call you back when I have time. It's hard to describe the feeling. It feels a bit like that time when I was finally caught and punished for doing something wrong, just a huge sense of relief.

chiefofgxbxl 9y ago
I agree. Obviously in today's world it seems difficult to not carry a phone. But I used to do this in college and it was marvelously liberating. I'd recommend two stages: 1. Remove your phone from your person, but still keep it with you. I.e. if you carry a backpack/purse/whatever, put your phone in there rather than in one of your pant pockets. 2. For small tasks, leave your phone in your room. Obviously more difficult than the first item. In college when my friends and I would go to the servery to get dinner, I would leave my phone in my dorm room. This is truly immersive because it gives you no possibility of even wanting to use it when you are enjoying the time you are spending with the people physically present with you. (Again... clearly more difficult in our world today, but look for small opportunities; going to a coffee shop with a friend? Leave the phone in your car's glove compartment for that 20min coffee break.)

dominotw 9y ago

blocking the site in /etc/hosts helped me a lot. I 've given up medium, reddit, all news sites. I add a site to /etc/hosts as soon as I feel like i am spending too much time on it. Interesting comment about 'owing it my kids' , I always felt like I am whiling my life away because I don't have kids and hence don't feel like taking like seriously. If I don't have kids, what am I striving for ?

pault 9y ago
Good question. A sense of accomplishment is a small pleasure, but it scales better than activities that provide high highs but inevitable low lows. Most people have an emotional equilibrium state; stresses and rewards can temporarily move the needle, but it tends to return to center regardless of the circumstance. Given that a lifetime of low-effort activity tends to limit opportunities for broadening your horizons and doesn't have a lasting contribution to happiness, a simple cost-benefit analysis indicates that dedication to personal growth is the best value for time spent. Ultimately, life only has the meaning you assign to it, so if you're optimizing for pleasure, learning and creative pursuits hold the most potential.
dredmorbius 9y ago
I have a large set of sites blocked at the router via dnsmasq, which scales well. (It also means my unrooted mobile device ... doesn't have such protections when it's outside the Mothership.)

gm-conspiracy 9y ago

Which sites lure you in?

nickjj 9y ago

I had this problem for a while. The good old social loop of death. A non-smartphone won't fix it. I think fixing this problem begins with you asking yourself why you're doing this. Are you procrastinating over doing something else? Are you passing time because you don't have anything else to do? Etc..

abootstrapper 9y ago

Delete your accounts. It's worth it.

ringaroundthetx 9y ago
"But muhhh faaaamily is on Facebook" scary dystopia they're addicted to

wpietri 9y ago

Say, could you say more about the exact pattern of how you do this? I've noticed that I have a few "distraction" sites that I'll visit. And then when I hit the end, I'll loop back in hopes of another hit of novelty. What strikes me is how ingrained it is; if I'm not careful I'll find myself on, e.g., Facebook, with no conscious intent. I've even caught myself having a feeling of boredom with what I'm looking at and typing "facebook.com" in the address bar while I'm on Facebook. Is this familiar? I ask because I'm thinking of building a WebExtension to notice and interrupt this cycle, so that I have to consciously want to use a distraction site. But I'm not sure how big the audience is.

eropple 9y ago
This, me, all the time. I would use such an extension.
tertius 9y ago
I use news feed eradicator with Facebook. It has solved it for me.

sliverstorm 9y ago

Rather than a dumbphone, which doesn't support actually-useful things like managing my calendar, notes, grocery lists, etc. I picked up a 2.4" android phone, on the theory that it will be annoying to browse, type, etc so I will only use it for useful things and not leisure. It seems to accomplish those goals, and as a kicker it has great battery life only when the screen is off... Just have to commit and port my number now. Sadly none of the tiny Android phones support Verizon.

jcims 9y ago

If you're thinking this now, do something about it now. I'm two years from empty nesting and can't fix the things I didn't do. All I can do is say that you won't be able to either if you wait until it's too late.

tertius 9y ago
Give us a list of things that we should stop doing today. I have a one year old.