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Actually, HN is more of a distraction to me than random people popping by.
by 1-6 5y ago
Actually, HN is more of a distraction to me than random people popping by.
- lkbm 5y agoI choose when to open HN. It might be more often than is ideal, but it's not mid-thought.
- paxys 5y agoThe fact that you are able to pick your own time to get distracted makes all the difference. I read HN when I'm blocked on something, waiting on a compile, on the loo, on a coffee break. The costs of context switching in these cases is very low compared to when I'm deep into debugging or writing code.
- bell-cot 5y agoHN has a few features which might help: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=814695 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=814695
- pcbro141 5y agoI use SelfControl on Mac to block sites for deep work: https://selfcontrolapp.com https://selfcontrolapp.com
- notatoad 5y agoHN feels like a distraction, but i find that when i don't have some sort of distraction i'm less productive. if i'm deep into solving some problem i don't have any motivation to check HN or other time wasters. but without some way to distract myself in small increments when i need a break, i end up "focusing" on unimportant tasks that aren't material to the actual task i need to complete, which end up wasting more of my time than a couple minutes of scrolling through HN or twitter. the problem isn't the wasted time, it's the interruption while you're trying to focus. there's nothing wrong with taking a break from focusing.