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> Take a long, hard look at your relationship with e-mail and social media. Although they are vital to everyday communication, they can claim much more attentio
by dmitryminkovsky 8y ago
> Take a long, hard look at your relationship with e-mail and social media. Although they are vital to everyday communication, they can claim much more attention than they deserve. Consider shutting them off completely as you work on a task that requires your full attention.
For me this strikes at the heart of a fundamental problem: on one hand we all want to maximize our attention span. On the other hand, the task of regulating and disciplining our use of social media is placed squarely on our own shoulders, which can be difficult because these platforms are intentionally addicting.
I developed Pony—email that sends and receives once a day—to give people a non-distracting place to communicate. The critical thing is that you don't have to regulate or discipline yourself. There's nothing to "turn off."
I've been using it for several months, and it's pretty funny: I still find myself checking my Inbox for something new even though I know that nothing new will come until tomorrow. The addictive power of social media is that strong and it keeps us from doing what’s important.
[0]: https://www.pony.gg https://www.pony.gg
- m_ke 8y agoI really want a client like that for HN, subreddits and my twitter feed, ideally with a feedback mechanism that can be used to rank the content based on my interests and filter out all of the other crap.
- dmitryminkovsky 8y agoMe too. It seems like instantaneity does not actually, by default improve everything. Instantaneity was one of the biggest, most novel things about the Internet/digital communication so it was adopted by default in all applications. But now I think it must be rethought.
- asark 8y agoRSS-to-email once a week, maybe with some other kind of filter (quality, popularity, keywords) in the middle for sites with too much noise (HN qualifies, lots of stories in a week). I think there are a couple sites that do that for HN, but aggregating everything would probably be a DIY job.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- hartator 8y agoThat’s awesome. Just signed up. Wonder if the answer should be technical. It feels like more a self controlled issue. Like I keep refreshing my emails for no real reasons. But if I block myself to this feed, I will just switch to another feed. Eg HN or Reddit.
- dmitryminkovsky 8y agoThank you! Please keep in touch and let me know what you think. I've found that using Pony is both strangely underwhelming and overwhelming at the same time... would love to hear other people's experiences. > Wonder if the answer should be technical. It feels like more a self controlled issue. That's exactly why I built Pony: to remove the self control factor. If the whole point of technology is to make us better, than why should we have to improve ourself (ie. improve our discipline, self control) just to use technology? > But if I block myself to this feed, I will just switch to another feed. Eg HN or Reddit. That's something I've experienced myself. For that I sometimes edit my hosts file to block services, or DNS at the router level. Of course that's kind of ridiculous...
- hartator 8y agoThat’s a good point. Not sure if I have an answer. The thing is there is a real - small but real - value of checking your emails or refreshing your feeds every 1h. Like if there is some kind of urgency or you’ll be missing out on something important. The added stress is not worth it though and it’s where I join you.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- dmitryminkovsky 8y agoYeah, I agree. I am starting with one delivery per day because that's simple and easy to communicate. But really I'd like to gather feedback and add delivery options. A delivery style I would enjoy, for example, is actually linking the time to sunrise/midday/sunset based on user location. Also, I think it would be nice to let users choose one or more of the delivery times, instead of just one. And once an hour, like you said, might work well for people.
- mnky9800n 8y agoI started only looking at slack after lunch. I get so much done in the morning I actually have time to fuck around on slack.