8 ms·

How I use the Internet in a healthy way

129 points by vitabenes 5y ago

rich_sasha 5y ago
Some nice pointers, well done to the author for keeping up with it. I would love to see similar tips adapted for parents of small children. Ones that start with “I wake up at 6 am by my toddler who just woke up, is already going 100% and wants to play Snow White”. Or “I break my fast at 11 am because I didn’t have time to eat before, and then I forgot”. I find myself using the phone to just switch off my mind from the usual overdrive of looking after kids, it’s probably not healthy but a tired mind craves something outside of toys and child dramas.
- roland35 5y ago
  Exactly! I found that a strict schedule goes out the window pretty quick with small children. What I try to do is have a few "anchor points" throughout the day - 11am is always lunch, 1 pm is nap time, 7:30 is bedtime. The rest of the day is pretty flexible. In order to get work done, I try to package my workflow so the feedback loop is as tight as possible. For coding, that means small tasks, good test loop, easy to deploy. I try to do at least a little each day, even 15 minutes, just to prevent myself from forgetting how everything works. It may not seem optimized, but I know the kids are quickly getting older and I'll both have more free time later and also miss spending lots of time with them when they were small!
- mrweasel 5y ago
  I’m currently struggling with this, I have a three year old, and a wife who work in retail. On the positive side, also every afternoon is set aside for my kid. The downside is that project of any kind is more or less relegated to a few hours in the evening or the few weekends with no other plans. As children get older they love helping with project around the house, but still, finding time is hard. My biggest success is keeping a list of small tasks, stuff which can be done in less than 15 minutes. You can actually churn through quite a few of those during an afternoon.
bruce343434 5y ago
I wonder how the author manages to get so much discipline and focus in the early morning without even having eaten. I notice that right after I eat I am way more focused and energetic, I think more clearly. Is this something genetic, or is it learned?
- lawlorino 5y ago
  I don't know how much of this is nature vs nurture but I think this is particular to the individual. I personally focus pretty well without needing breakfast but my partner is the opposite.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  I’m the opposite; while fasting (overnight/naturally, nothing outlandish), I have focus and any carb-heavy, time-heavy, or mass-heavy eating will destroy that. When left alone (typically if the family is traveling on a school break where I can’t), I will sometimes forget to eat entirely for a day if engrossed in a hobby, especially one that involves programming. I start with the default premise that such differences aren’t genetic, but rather environmental. In my case, I’m overweight as one contributing difference. I’ve noticed that people I’ve dated who were thinner have a much harder time going long periods (such as might happen when we were traveling together). I don’t recommend becoming overweight, of course, but it likely has a thin silver lining here, especially when combined with a ketogenic (even temporarily) diet.
- QuibbleQuota 5y ago
  It’s trained. Once the body is adapted to burning fat instead of carbs while fasted many people find focusing to be much easier since they’re running on a much more consistent fuel rather than a roller coaster of blood sugar spikes. Think of a slow burning furnace rather than a warehouse full of tinder. Atm you feel better after eating because your body is dependant on that hit. Research time-restricted eating, or as it’s called by most people, intermittent fasting.
  - heurisko 5y ago
    Do you have any large studies demonstrating the effects of intermittent fasting on focus, versus eating three times a day?
frereubu 5y ago
The "no email before 11am" mirrors my approach, which is no email before noon, which in turn was inspired by Karl Friston, who I met a couple of times during a neuroscience masters at UCL: "His greeting to the group is liable to be his first substantial utterance of the day, as Friston prefers not to speak with other human beings before noon. (At home, he will have conversed with his wife and three sons via an agreed-upon series of smiles and grunts.)" https://www.wired.com/story/karl-friston-free-energy-principle-artificial-intelligence/ https://www.wired.com/story/karl-friston-free-energy-princip... (I should add for balance that a couple of colleagues that I know said he was a nightmare to work with in terms of getting things done on time though!) The one this I disagree with in the article is the alarm clock. Much better to go to bed at a time where you'll wake up naturally roughly around the time you want to. (Presuming you're not the kind of person who'd naturally sleep for as long as you're left alone, in which perhaps there may be other things - caffeine intake, too much alcohol, eating badly etc. - that it might be worth focussing on first.)
- mobilemidget 5y ago
  https://sleepcalculator.com https://sleepcalculator.com
simonbarker87 5y ago
Whenever I read something like this it always comes across as insufferably pompous and actually quite a limiting and sad life. I would much rather just handle a mix of different things and have some variety to my day and life than this super buttoned down approach. I’m glad it works for the author but when I’m making a cup of tea I think I’ll keep scrolling Instagram thanks. I fully expect to downvoted into oblivion for this comment.
- cdirkx 5y ago
  Everything is okay in moderation, it's just that moderating yourself requires some discipline and some of the uses of the internet are actively trying to get you addicted. One "solution" is thus to just never interact with certain stuff, although I agree you then miss out on some of the good parts of the internet.
  - chasd00 5y ago
    to me, general internet browsing without an intent is like eating a bag of doritos. It's fine from time to time but don't down a "family size" bag all in one sitting, it's just not good for you.
  - samhw 5y ago
    > some of the uses of the internet are actively trying to get you addicted No offence intended, but I find this trope really exhausting. Web products - like any other product in the world - are designed to be enjoyable, and a side effect of that is that you will want to use them more. That's not what addiction is. I don't wake up in cold sweats needing to scroll through Instagram. My tolerance doesn't increase, I don't experience withdrawal, I wouldn't suffer if you removed it from me. It's a horrendous mutilation of the meaning of the word, using it to mean 'an enjoyable habit'. I've been addicted to heroin, and I could talk at you for days about the difference. This, along with other popular tropes like the 'corporations are responsible for 95% of carbon emissions' one, seem to be designed to excuse the individual from straightforward behavioural issues, like not being able to control their procrastination. I'm not complaining because I feel corporations are attacked, but because this isn't a healthy way to face (or rather not face) your problems.
galoisgirl 5y ago
Good for the author that they found what works for them. I wouldn't call the article "How to use the Internet in a healthy way", though. There's no discussion on what constitutes healthy and what does not, how to tell reading from procrastination, or exploring a new topic from doomscrolling. Knowing what the author does is pointless when we don't know anything about them. If someone says they're a programmer with ADHD, we probably face similar challenges, so they'll have my interest. If someone is a parent of 5 with their own business, I respect the hell out of them, but I won't be able to relate. I find Nir Eyal's advice way better.
fish45 5y ago
This isn't "How to use the internet in a healthy way", this is "How to not use the Internet in an unhealthy way"
gego 5y ago
...interesting approach, but how would you do it with the beautiful chaos kids and family bring into any plan? Would really like to hear from people who did this...
causi 5y ago
I think I improved my internet usage habits when I started categorizing my usage into either "content" or "comfort" and examining when and why I was using either, with an eye to reducing the reasons I was subconsciously seeking out comfort material. That's helped me both reduce stress behaviors in my life and maximize the fraction of time I spend exposing myself to things that are actually worth remembering. Small things, like listening to an audiobook while you do laundry instead of the same three albums you listen to every day, can have a marked effect on your sense of personal growth.
mabub24 5y ago
I've said this a bunch of times before on articles like this, which are fairly commonly posted on HN, likely because the people who populate HN are very online and work on computers all day: If you think you are spending too much time online, or you think you are wasting your time online, a solution is, for lack of a better way of saying it, to get a life. (I don't mean that in the "get a life, nerd" way) Get things you want to do, hopefully with other people, hopefully ever so often in person. Once you actually have goals and ambitions, social relationships to maintain, you will see your use of the internet changing quite a bit. Personally, I think some people get far too attached to the idea that the internet is a place to hangout or a place to just be. In some cases that can be true, but it pales in comparison to hanging out in person and doing things. The internet is a tool, and once you have things to do with it, especially with people you know and meet in person or in service of a project, you begin to change how you use it pretty much right away.
- pantulis 5y ago
  For me this is a matter of timeblocking my personal life too. If I don't have anything else, I basically procrastinate by browsing the Internet (Reddit! HN! All shiny new stuff!) So every quarter I have my objectives (I shudder to write the OKR word) and then time block my personal calendar. I have calculated I have around 20 hours per week of "me" time (besides work, sleep, home stuff, and so on). Do I want to get healthy? Bam! There goes 3 hours per week! Do I want to learn to play the piano? Bam! That would be 4 hours sir. Meditate? 2 hours per week. Read fiction books? Bam! 4 hours and you're done. Visualizing that time is scarce helps me a lot.
  - mabub24 5y ago
    Timeblocking can help. I think it also helps to make and sustain friends, which is a kind of "work" in its own right as you mature into adulthood. You begin to learn that lifelong relationships take effort and almost always meeting each other in person. For all but the very few, loneliness is very detrimental to your health and sense of well-being, and I don't think being online is a "cure" or even a very good facsimile. Some people get far to into the idea that "being online" is their hobby, that the relationships they make online are as important as the relationships they make offline. And I would gently disagree in almost every case. The relationships we make online are often ephemeral, anonymous, and superficial. They have their time and place, but they don't replace relationships with real people you can see and interact with in person. They are not nearly as fulfilling. For people that game a lot, for instance, games often have online communities, but I've always found that online communities pale in comparison to in-person events or LANs. All attempts to recreate them online are but shadows of the real thing. Once you start to see being online as just a minor attachment to your offline life, then being online simply stops having as much importance in your life.
baremetal 5y ago
i recommend meditation. it makes it easier to focus on tasks one at a time. and not get distracted by the internet. your mind is a muscle and it also requires training to function properly. YMMV.
gadrev 5y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_o7qjN3KF8U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_o7qjN3KF8U
stared 5y ago
I am happy it works for them. Otherwise, it is bragging and an elaborate way of "just don't procrastinate". Planning to have one (or another) schedule is one thing, the easy one. Consistent execution is hard for some and impossible for others. The difficulty comes from many reasons: health, the need of working with people from the different time zone, other less predictive commitments (e.g. parenting), neurodiversity (for many people with ADHD boosting dopamine is a necessity; no distraction does not equate to productivity; it equates no energy to do anything).
javier10e6 5y ago
At one point the mobile phone turns into a Skinner Box? It is my claim that the amount of hours vested on Internet consumption is directly proportional to the inability to interpret in person body language, verbal cues and in person room reading...among other things.
- Apocryphon 5y ago
  I’m not sure if the desktop browser is any less of a Skinner box. At least mobile devices are more limited by screen real estate.
JackFr 5y ago
TFA: > For daily tips: > Follow @deprocrastinate LOL
waynesonfire 5y ago
"in a healthy way"? Who are you to judge what is and is not healthy?
alexjplant 5y ago
I'm a huge fan of LeechBlock [1] and use it on every general-purpose computer that I own. I commit various blocklists to a public GitHub repo and configure each instance to download the lists at startup. I have a hard block list for useless/previously-overfrequented sites and a soft block that is configured to block after a specified period; the soft block is also configured as a hard block on my work laptop. It's astounding how your thought process changes when you aren't stuck compulsively doom-scrolling through ML-derived feeds of worthless nonsense. [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/leechblock-ng/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/leechblock-ng...
hammyhavoc 5y ago
Is it just me that thinks the CSS on this site is poor and makes the site difficult to read? Viewed it on Firefox.

129 points by vitabenes 5y ago

Some nice pointers, well done to the author for keeping up with it. I would love to see similar tips adapted for parents of small children. Ones that start with “I wake up at 6 am by my toddler who just woke up, is already going 100% and wants to play Snow White”. Or “I break my fast at 11 am because I didn’t have time to eat before, and then I forgot”. I find myself using the phone to just switch off my mind from the usual overdrive of looking after kids, it’s probably not healthy but a tired mind craves something outside of toys and child dramas.

roland35 5y ago
Exactly! I found that a strict schedule goes out the window pretty quick with small children. What I try to do is have a few "anchor points" throughout the day - 11am is always lunch, 1 pm is nap time, 7:30 is bedtime. The rest of the day is pretty flexible. In order to get work done, I try to package my workflow so the feedback loop is as tight as possible. For coding, that means small tasks, good test loop, easy to deploy. I try to do at least a little each day, even 15 minutes, just to prevent myself from forgetting how everything works. It may not seem optimized, but I know the kids are quickly getting older and I'll both have more free time later and also miss spending lots of time with them when they were small!
mrweasel 5y ago
I’m currently struggling with this, I have a three year old, and a wife who work in retail. On the positive side, also every afternoon is set aside for my kid. The downside is that project of any kind is more or less relegated to a few hours in the evening or the few weekends with no other plans. As children get older they love helping with project around the house, but still, finding time is hard. My biggest success is keeping a list of small tasks, stuff which can be done in less than 15 minutes. You can actually churn through quite a few of those during an afternoon.

bruce343434 5y ago

I wonder how the author manages to get so much discipline and focus in the early morning without even having eaten. I notice that right after I eat I am way more focused and energetic, I think more clearly. Is this something genetic, or is it learned?

lawlorino 5y ago
I don't know how much of this is nature vs nurture but I think this is particular to the individual. I personally focus pretty well without needing breakfast but my partner is the opposite.
sokoloff 5y ago
I’m the opposite; while fasting (overnight/naturally, nothing outlandish), I have focus and any carb-heavy, time-heavy, or mass-heavy eating will destroy that. When left alone (typically if the family is traveling on a school break where I can’t), I will sometimes forget to eat entirely for a day if engrossed in a hobby, especially one that involves programming. I start with the default premise that such differences aren’t genetic, but rather environmental. In my case, I’m overweight as one contributing difference. I’ve noticed that people I’ve dated who were thinner have a much harder time going long periods (such as might happen when we were traveling together). I don’t recommend becoming overweight, of course, but it likely has a thin silver lining here, especially when combined with a ketogenic (even temporarily) diet.
QuibbleQuota 5y ago
It’s trained. Once the body is adapted to burning fat instead of carbs while fasted many people find focusing to be much easier since they’re running on a much more consistent fuel rather than a roller coaster of blood sugar spikes. Think of a slow burning furnace rather than a warehouse full of tinder. Atm you feel better after eating because your body is dependant on that hit. Research time-restricted eating, or as it’s called by most people, intermittent fasting.
- heurisko 5y ago
  Do you have any large studies demonstrating the effects of intermittent fasting on focus, versus eating three times a day?

frereubu 5y ago

The "no email before 11am" mirrors my approach, which is no email before noon, which in turn was inspired by Karl Friston, who I met a couple of times during a neuroscience masters at UCL: "His greeting to the group is liable to be his first substantial utterance of the day, as Friston prefers not to speak with other human beings before noon. (At home, he will have conversed with his wife and three sons via an agreed-upon series of smiles and grunts.)" https://www.wired.com/story/karl-friston-free-energy-principle-artificial-intelligence/ https://www.wired.com/story/karl-friston-free-energy-princip... (I should add for balance that a couple of colleagues that I know said he was a nightmare to work with in terms of getting things done on time though!) The one this I disagree with in the article is the alarm clock. Much better to go to bed at a time where you'll wake up naturally roughly around the time you want to. (Presuming you're not the kind of person who'd naturally sleep for as long as you're left alone, in which perhaps there may be other things - caffeine intake, too much alcohol, eating badly etc. - that it might be worth focussing on first.)

mobilemidget 5y ago
https://sleepcalculator.com https://sleepcalculator.com

simonbarker87 5y ago

Whenever I read something like this it always comes across as insufferably pompous and actually quite a limiting and sad life. I would much rather just handle a mix of different things and have some variety to my day and life than this super buttoned down approach. I’m glad it works for the author but when I’m making a cup of tea I think I’ll keep scrolling Instagram thanks. I fully expect to downvoted into oblivion for this comment.

cdirkx 5y ago
Everything is okay in moderation, it's just that moderating yourself requires some discipline and some of the uses of the internet are actively trying to get you addicted. One "solution" is thus to just never interact with certain stuff, although I agree you then miss out on some of the good parts of the internet.
- chasd00 5y ago
  to me, general internet browsing without an intent is like eating a bag of doritos. It's fine from time to time but don't down a "family size" bag all in one sitting, it's just not good for you.
- samhw 5y ago
  > some of the uses of the internet are actively trying to get you addicted No offence intended, but I find this trope really exhausting. Web products - like any other product in the world - are designed to be enjoyable, and a side effect of that is that you will want to use them more. That's not what addiction is. I don't wake up in cold sweats needing to scroll through Instagram. My tolerance doesn't increase, I don't experience withdrawal, I wouldn't suffer if you removed it from me. It's a horrendous mutilation of the meaning of the word, using it to mean 'an enjoyable habit'. I've been addicted to heroin, and I could talk at you for days about the difference. This, along with other popular tropes like the 'corporations are responsible for 95% of carbon emissions' one, seem to be designed to excuse the individual from straightforward behavioural issues, like not being able to control their procrastination. I'm not complaining because I feel corporations are attacked, but because this isn't a healthy way to face (or rather not face) your problems.

galoisgirl 5y ago

Good for the author that they found what works for them. I wouldn't call the article "How to use the Internet in a healthy way", though. There's no discussion on what constitutes healthy and what does not, how to tell reading from procrastination, or exploring a new topic from doomscrolling. Knowing what the author does is pointless when we don't know anything about them. If someone says they're a programmer with ADHD, we probably face similar challenges, so they'll have my interest. If someone is a parent of 5 with their own business, I respect the hell out of them, but I won't be able to relate. I find Nir Eyal's advice way better.

fish45 5y ago

This isn't "How to use the internet in a healthy way", this is "How to not use the Internet in an unhealthy way"

gego 5y ago

...interesting approach, but how would you do it with the beautiful chaos kids and family bring into any plan? Would really like to hear from people who did this...

causi 5y ago

I think I improved my internet usage habits when I started categorizing my usage into either "content" or "comfort" and examining when and why I was using either, with an eye to reducing the reasons I was subconsciously seeking out comfort material. That's helped me both reduce stress behaviors in my life and maximize the fraction of time I spend exposing myself to things that are actually worth remembering. Small things, like listening to an audiobook while you do laundry instead of the same three albums you listen to every day, can have a marked effect on your sense of personal growth.

mabub24 5y ago

I've said this a bunch of times before on articles like this, which are fairly commonly posted on HN, likely because the people who populate HN are very online and work on computers all day: If you think you are spending too much time online, or you think you are wasting your time online, a solution is, for lack of a better way of saying it, to get a life. (I don't mean that in the "get a life, nerd" way) Get things you want to do, hopefully with other people, hopefully ever so often in person. Once you actually have goals and ambitions, social relationships to maintain, you will see your use of the internet changing quite a bit. Personally, I think some people get far too attached to the idea that the internet is a place to hangout or a place to just be. In some cases that can be true, but it pales in comparison to hanging out in person and doing things. The internet is a tool, and once you have things to do with it, especially with people you know and meet in person or in service of a project, you begin to change how you use it pretty much right away.

pantulis 5y ago
For me this is a matter of timeblocking my personal life too. If I don't have anything else, I basically procrastinate by browsing the Internet (Reddit! HN! All shiny new stuff!) So every quarter I have my objectives (I shudder to write the OKR word) and then time block my personal calendar. I have calculated I have around 20 hours per week of "me" time (besides work, sleep, home stuff, and so on). Do I want to get healthy? Bam! There goes 3 hours per week! Do I want to learn to play the piano? Bam! That would be 4 hours sir. Meditate? 2 hours per week. Read fiction books? Bam! 4 hours and you're done. Visualizing that time is scarce helps me a lot.
- mabub24 5y ago
  Timeblocking can help. I think it also helps to make and sustain friends, which is a kind of "work" in its own right as you mature into adulthood. You begin to learn that lifelong relationships take effort and almost always meeting each other in person. For all but the very few, loneliness is very detrimental to your health and sense of well-being, and I don't think being online is a "cure" or even a very good facsimile. Some people get far to into the idea that "being online" is their hobby, that the relationships they make online are as important as the relationships they make offline. And I would gently disagree in almost every case. The relationships we make online are often ephemeral, anonymous, and superficial. They have their time and place, but they don't replace relationships with real people you can see and interact with in person. They are not nearly as fulfilling. For people that game a lot, for instance, games often have online communities, but I've always found that online communities pale in comparison to in-person events or LANs. All attempts to recreate them online are but shadows of the real thing. Once you start to see being online as just a minor attachment to your offline life, then being online simply stops having as much importance in your life.

baremetal 5y ago

i recommend meditation. it makes it easier to focus on tasks one at a time. and not get distracted by the internet. your mind is a muscle and it also requires training to function properly. YMMV.

gadrev 5y ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_o7qjN3KF8U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_o7qjN3KF8U

stared 5y ago

I am happy it works for them. Otherwise, it is bragging and an elaborate way of "just don't procrastinate". Planning to have one (or another) schedule is one thing, the easy one. Consistent execution is hard for some and impossible for others. The difficulty comes from many reasons: health, the need of working with people from the different time zone, other less predictive commitments (e.g. parenting), neurodiversity (for many people with ADHD boosting dopamine is a necessity; no distraction does not equate to productivity; it equates no energy to do anything).

javier10e6 5y ago

At one point the mobile phone turns into a Skinner Box? It is my claim that the amount of hours vested on Internet consumption is directly proportional to the inability to interpret in person body language, verbal cues and in person room reading...among other things.

Apocryphon 5y ago
I’m not sure if the desktop browser is any less of a Skinner box. At least mobile devices are more limited by screen real estate.

JackFr 5y ago

TFA: > For daily tips: > Follow @deprocrastinate LOL

waynesonfire 5y ago

"in a healthy way"? Who are you to judge what is and is not healthy?

alexjplant 5y ago

I'm a huge fan of LeechBlock [1] and use it on every general-purpose computer that I own. I commit various blocklists to a public GitHub repo and configure each instance to download the lists at startup. I have a hard block list for useless/previously-overfrequented sites and a soft block that is configured to block after a specified period; the soft block is also configured as a hard block on my work laptop. It's astounding how your thought process changes when you aren't stuck compulsively doom-scrolling through ML-derived feeds of worthless nonsense. [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/leechblock-ng/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/leechblock-ng...

hammyhavoc 5y ago

Is it just me that thinks the CSS on this site is poor and makes the site difficult to read? Viewed it on Firefox.