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Ask HN: How do you stop time wasting on the internet?

27 points by ChildOfChaos 4y ago

I'm not on social media (Twitter, Instagram, Tiktok, fb etc) and I don't use my phone that often but I spend a lot of time on computers and tend to waste a lot of time on Reddit/HN/ simular sources.

LinuxBender 4y ago
My personal experience is to have a schedule. A vague outline of things I want to get done. I spend a little time on the internet in between jobs around the house or on the homestead. This allows me to take a break from having the entire world in front of my face and I get some sunlight to promote mitochondrial health. This has helped my sleep a great deal and keeps me physically active. After doing some heavy lifting and moving of things I come in, take a quick shower and then have a cup of lemon balm tea and see what the internet is up to. Like you, I also do not use social media beyond HN.
dflock 4y ago
I've found this Chrome/Edge extension very helpful: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/intention-stop-mindless-b/dladanhaondcgpahgiflodhckhoeohoe https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/intention-stop-min...
startupsales 4y ago
time blocking
klyrs 4y ago
Get off HN! (observe pot calling kettle black) It's hard, honestly, to do work on computers, because they're rife with distractions. When I want to read, I deliberately leave my phone in the other room. When I can, work things out with pen&paper, again, phone and computer in another room -- but it's rare that a problem I'm working on can be approached with pen&paper.
- boredemployee 4y ago
  That's why I bought an Amazon Fire 8 tablet. It's cheap, not a top device (less apps, less distraction), but still useful for reading pdfs, books and what not. I just love it for studying and reading books.
akprasad 4y ago
I found it useful to focus less on reducing time on computers etc. and more on increasing time on the things I really cared about. To use a food analogy: when a person has a great and satisfying meal, they have much less appetite to binge eat a bag of chips.
- kradeelav 4y ago
  100% agreed. To add what you mentioned about increasing time on the things you care about, personally found it helpful to link a purpose to those specific actions in my head and mentally state it. For example -- "I've been anxious lately, I should sit down and journal in my physical notebook for 5 minutes" or "I haven't taken a lot of play time to myself lately, let's go read something offline for 30 minutes." Re-framing it slightly so it feels like a practical suggestion to immediately do something from somebody else to myself helps break down a lot of the procrastinationation loops, imo. Triggers that "I want to be useful" feeling.
- themadturk 4y ago
  Indeed. I make a commitment to read more books this year, and started a reading diary to help me along, and it has worked. My book reading is almost exclusively digital (Kindle, reading also on iPad and iPhone occasionally). I also have almost entirely gotten off social media, helped by putting specific Twitter users and subreddits into my NewsBin feed, where it's much easier to avoid algorithm influence. I open the apps or websites only if I want to respond or ask a question.
TakeBlaster16 4y ago
Add whatever site is sucking up your time to /etc/hosts.
- atwood22 4y ago
  I do this too. It's pretty crazy how often I find myself staring at an error page wondering what happened.
- pshushereba 4y ago
  Forgive my ignorance, but what does this do? I'm interested. Would I just add Twitter/Reddit/whatever to the file with an IP of 0.0.0.0 so it throws an error or something?
  - valbaca 4y ago
    When you go to a website, there's a DNS lookup to find the IP address to use for it. By setting this you can tell your computer "instead of actually going to HackerNews, go to [website] instead" https://linuxize.com/post/how-to-edit-your-hosts-file/ https://linuxize.com/post/how-to-edit-your-hosts-file/
  - somenameforme 4y ago
    I prefer 127.0.0.1. That's a "self" IP that will redirect to your own machine. If you have no web server setup, it'll just give a 404/not found error. If you do have one, then you have some more creative options given you're visiting it as a result of going to site you're trying to wean yourself off of.
GekkePrutser 4y ago
Is it really a waste? I work in IT security and I find HN (and some other sites) very useful. Much insightful stuff in the comments. I spend a lot of time here especially when I don't have anything better to do but I wouldn't call it a waste. If you had been on Facebook etc then yeah that is a total waste. I think you're doing pretty well already.
- somenameforme 4y ago
  There's certainly plenty of great content here, but if you could see the hours you've spent on it, and it ended up amount to days, and weeks, perhaps months of time - it starts to become a consideration of imagining what else you could have done with that time. "If I'd spent those hours doing [x], I'd [insert desirable thing] by now!" Of course shit posting is often much more enjoyable than "doing [x]" or we wouldn't be doing it in the first place, so there's some life balance issues - but it's a real consideration nonetheless. I often wonder how many Einsteins went without ever truly finding their niche; not because of lack of development in some area, but because of it! The internet can provide endless addictive entertainment and enjoyment, even of a higher brow nature. It's easy to lose yourself in it.
toast0 4y ago
Use an LTE hotspot with a very small quota for fast data, and unlimited quota of slow data. You can still do everything you need, but everything will be awful, and you'll not enjoy doing anything you only want to do.
zmxz 4y ago
Log out. Reddit/HN are less appealing when you can't interact with someone, especially if you feel they're wrong and correct info needs to be supplied. If you really want to stop doing something, don't place yourself in a situation where it's easy to do so.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- senectus1 4y ago
  Thats mostly true. but things like tik tok and youtube shorts are a cornucopia of trash that kills time and drags attention. I can only keep away by "internally" rating the whole platform as trash.
abawany 4y ago
The plugin Distract-Me-Not on Firefox really helped me define rules that helped discipline. I admit I sometimes defeat its rules, such as now, but that is cumbersome to do and time-limited. Excellent plugin.
gzer0 4y ago
I find myself in a similar situation: a constant cycle of information seeking as a form of procrastination itself.
vehemenz 4y ago
Your mileage may vary, but I've found it helpful to remove my browser's default search engine, so I can't search directly from the address bar. I also clear my cookies regularly so that logging into Reddit or Twitter becomes more deliberate. For Instagram, Tiktok, and Facebook specifically, my only recommendation is to delete your accounts and exercise abstinence. Worked for me anyway.
NanoWar 4y ago
Best way for me is to move the browser app icon to a different position (on mobile) so that I don't find it immediately. That way I hesitate a moment and sometimes don't start wasting time.
RomanPushkin 4y ago
I have the same problem solved for kid with coin dispenser and coin acceptor. Coin acceptor is connected right to OpenWrt router via USB. Once you put a quarter, it turns on Internet for 30 more minutes. Dispenser is connected to PC with the app where he has to solve (not very hard) math puzzles. When you reach the score of 10, the coin is getting dispensed. Internet usage is down 2-3 times now, compared to what it was before. Even if you have a router in another room with a single physical button attached via USB, you'll be lazy going to another room to turn the Internet on. Have a book by your place and you'll see how much you started reading. Reach out if you need OpenWrt router hacking help.
- jfim 4y ago
  Wow, that's a great idea, and it turns the Internet into a reward ("how can I use this limited resource effectively") as opposed to nonstop mindless scrolling. Is the router off for everyone when disabled or is it like an IP based block using the router's API to add and remove blocks on demand?
  - RomanPushkin 4y ago
    There are two WiFi networks pretty much - one for work (provided by Xfinity), another one is an OpenWrt router WiFi, which is connected by WiFi to Xfinity WiFi.
davidhariri 4y ago
SelfControl.app
jonfw 4y ago
Personally, I blocked most websites on my primary browser on my work computer, and I set a maxvisit and minaway on my hackernews profile. So I get 20 minutes of slacking off on hackernews, and then I get booted off for a few hours, and the other time sucks are blocked. I've also turned off history auto-suggestions in my search/URL box, so that when I look for a website it only suggests relevant work locations I define in my bookmarks. I can (and often do) open a secondary browser to waste my time with, but I don't do it quite as impulsively. And when I'm ready to go back to work, I just kill that second browser window, and I've effectively removed myself from the distracting context
- ChildOfChaos 4y ago
  Ohh that is interesting, didn't know that Hacker news had this feature.
nend 4y ago
I block distracting sites/apps from 6:30am-6:30pm, with browser extensions/app blockers. It's a pretty simple and free solution, takes maybe 10 minutes to install and configure. Yes there are fairly easy ways to get around the blocks, but 90% of the time I'm able to respect the block and so it saves hours of time daily.
night-rider 4y ago
I sanction a brief window of time for the socials at night. I wear special 'computer glasses' that block blue light, and turn the brightness down on the device too. Blue light ruins sleep, so the less of it, the better. All my feeds are high signal, and I come out of it enriched, not drained or fatigued or feeling like I've wasted time.
1983054104 4y ago
I was like you before. You need to stop finding software solutions with your problems. Productivity blogs/fads/tools come and go. You need "discipline." That's all. Productivity is temporary, discipline is forever.
asldjajlfkj 4y ago
I can recommend the app ColdTurkey, if you use Mac or Windows. You can block sites permanently, in blocks or give yourself an allowance. It’s a lot tougher than /etc/hosts: Disabling it during a locked block is very hard. That’s perfect for me. I permanently blocked all news sites and gave me an allowance for HN. There are also extensions that remove the recommended feed from Reddit, so you can still interact with pages found from search, but can’t discover new content once on Reddit. That greatly reduces my time spent there.
Someone1234 4y ago
Unaffiliated but "Cold Turkey" for Windows/MacOS. They let you create a highly flexible schedule (e.g. lunch breaks), and even support Pomodoro Timers (e.g. 20 on, 20 off, etc). But the biggest feature is privacy respecting (i.e. non-cloud, non-sharing data with advertisers) and non-subscription. It is just an old-fashioned desktop application with several browser extensions. They have some nice website lists to save initial setup time like "social media" or "shopping" that will nuke all the big names. But they support wild cards or even application specific blocks. HN isn't in the "social media" list by the way. It is designed to be hard to bypass/disable/modify. Even how each individual block's settings are locked is very configurable, which is nice. The UI does suffer from the "invisible button" trend, so you'll have to figure out that there are three buttons under each block none of which look like clickable buttons (schedule config, break config, and settings-lock config). Also, the "On" button enables/disables the SCHEDULE rather than the block itself. So if a block isn't working after scheduling making sure it is "On" too. PS - No doubt I'll get crapped on by the "just self-control" crowd. I'd argue that if this problem was easily overcome, people wouldn't be making threads on the topic and continuing to have problems. I don't think application enforcement should be anyone's long term goal, I see it more like a Nicotine Patch, a temp middle-ground to help make achieving your goals easier.
_aavaa_ 4y ago
While the other comments are useful (either use more technology or self control) I don’t have think they really address the actual problem. Whenever I find myself doing this it’s always because I am avoiding something (either doing something or thinking about something). Find out what those things are, and deal with them.
- Someone1234 4y ago
  > Find out what those things are, and deal with them. That's up there with "just be more happy" (for depression), "just exercise," "just eat less food" (for obesity) in terms of being entirely unconstructive. Yes, chronic procrastination is an avoidance technique but "just do it" isn't actually an effective strategy to overcoming it. Here's a video that people suffering from this may actually find helpful: https://youtu.be/sYhQMR8FrKc https://youtu.be/sYhQMR8FrKc It offers actionable advice and strategies.
  - _aavaa_ 4y ago
    My point wasn’t to say “just do it”, but rather “focus on this instead since it might be the actual problem”. The other advice given if “install this software to block sites” may not actually work since without the sites they’ll just find for another way to distract themselves
bryanlarsen 4y ago
LeechBlock browser extension.
haskell_melody 4y ago
Pipe all the sites you find yourself getting distracted on into /etc/hosts and redirect them to 127.0.0.1.
sidcool 4y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31426683 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31426683
NoMAD76 4y ago
1st I make use of uBlock Origin filters and I blocked all distracting sources (social media, reddit, etc) 2nd I also blocked via browser any images so I have only text 3rd I try to learn or read about things that fit into my interest zone while avoiding anything else 4th Since I live with my gf I try to spend as much time as possible with her (talking mostly), this way we're both off the distracting internet sources I value my time more since I'm in my mid 40s, I don't think I waste my time on the internet if I'm reading about something that (see point 3) When I was a child and right after high-school, the internet was either non-existent or not-accessible. But I do believe that it's the most beautiful thing invented in the last century, it's mind blowing how much can you learn/see/find if you don't waste your time into scroll/click spiral. If you know where to look/search, there are treasures everywhere on the internet.
hummerbliss 4y ago
I fould book Deep Work by Cal Newport enlightning on how to cultivate quitting social media (and other shallow work) and develop habit of deep work. How to Work Deeply ? How to decide on your depth philosophy ? Ritualize your deep work Make Grand Gestures Embrace Boredom Drain the shallows Quantifying the depth of the work you do.
nathants 4y ago
have your computer lock you out for 10 minutes every 35 minutes. forced breaks are good for getting exercise throughout the day. when you sit back down you can CHOOSE to go back to time wasting, or not.
marto1 4y ago
Go for a repeatable offline physical activity that engages all of your attention, e.g. chopping wood, hunting, fishing, a lot of sports fall into this category as well. Try to go for something that is easy to organize so you have more opportunity to rewire your brain a bit.
betwixthewires 4y ago
So the first step is to figure out if you're actually wasting time, and how much of the time you spend is actually a waste. We live in a pretty strange world, strange in a new way: we can interact with anyone in the world and we can learn anything we want with minimal effort. We can also endlessly be entertained passively if we choose to do that. You don't really think about it much, but before smart phones we had to set time aside and go sit at a desktop machine to use the internet, so you had to actually have something to do, or time to kill. Before the internet, we used to loaf around reading books, sipping on tea, flipping through television channels, and before television we used to have a ton of downtime. We didn't stress over the downtime that much because it was just a fact of life. Now that we can be productive in some way all the time due to the internet, we tend to think of the time we spend doing nothing as a waste, a new phenomenon brought on by phones, but it isn't really true. Human beings have always spent about half their waking hours loafing about. The ones that loved learning read book after book. It's never been easier to read book after book than it is now. So are you actually wasting time? What are you reading? Reddit has a very bad signal to noise ratio, especially as of late, but there's valuable stuff there. HN is quite a bit better, but still a lot of it will be uninteresting to some and interesting to others. I spend a lot of time reading on my phone. Books, articles, conversations on this site, and I've improved my vocabulary and command of the English language immensely, I've learned quite a bit on a wide set of topics, I can read Cyrillic and Greek phonetically and I can walk you through the particles in the standard model and what their properties are, I know a bit about information theory, and a bunch more. I couldn't dream of doing all this learning 30 years ago with just a public library available, it would've cost me hundreds of thousands of dollars and taken me insane amounts of time to source the material. I'd be sitting around watching TV drinking miller lite believing things like "if you ask a cop if he's a cop he has to tell you" because I'd have had no way to easily check if what someone told me was true. It's likely you'd have wasted more time if smartphones didn't exist. This idea that every waking moment needs to be productive is incorrect. Before smartphone you'd probably spend most of your free time watching TV and drinking beer. So if what you do on your downtime is rewarding, it's not a waste. And if you're like me and you soak up information like a sponge and love learning, these devices are a blessing. Just decide not to spend downtime doing things that aren't rewarding to you, downtime is not the problem, being unhappy with how you spend it is. Learning interesting things is certainly not a waste of time, and neither is watching egirls on twitch if that's what you enjoy, because you'd have been watching married with children reruns otherwise.
tomjen3 4y ago
A couple of things: 1. demand more. If a headline can't prove to you that it is relevant, it isn't. This essentially cuts out all click-baits, but that is just the start of it. If Twitter and/or Facebook doesn't _consistently_ provide value to you, they are out. I have a couple of people who insist on organizing things on Facebook, but I just check my notifications (on the site), I don't look at the feed because it does not provide enough value. Reddit is my big issue. I spent way too much time on r/news, r/ukraine etc so I have decided just not to visit reddit until september, then I will have to reevaluate it. 2. Intentionallity. Many sites can be very valuable or a complete waste of time. I have spent a lot of time on YouTube, but I have also gotten a lot of value out of it. I have also watched a lot of videos that were not very valuable. I definitely still struggle with intentionallity, but the idea is that you spend your time on something you want, not what diverse algorithms want you spend the time on. In general: your eyeballs are very important and I think it is fair that you demand a high price for your attention. That doesn't mean that you have to be productive at all times, being paid in fun is fine, being paid in aweinspiringness or whatever else you value is fine too. But demand a high price for your attention. The key is to note on how you feel afterwards: if you feel queizy and slightly-to full on regretfull, then you should change going forward. If you feel happy then, fine, you just spent a lot of time on something you enjoyed - there is no problem with that.
sys_64738 4y ago
Don't allow yourself to do anything non-work on work computers. Don't allow yourself to login to any reddit/HN/other sites from any computer. Disable networking on your computer when you need to use it for productivity. Basically put awkward barriers between you and the internet so you don't have an easy means to slip-up.
ravish0007 4y ago
Book suggestion: "Digital Minimalism" - Cal Newport
marto1 4y ago
What works best is small steps, I believe. First deal with your smartphone access. Delete all, but essential apps(e.g. your work) in your phone, you can still visit whatever you want on another device you don't carry around with you everywhere, e.g. a laptop. Do that for a month or until you feel ok about it. Start to do SOMETHING ELSE that is somewhat productive, e.g. a sport and is not browsing the internet. Make sure over time to up prioritize that activity and down prioritize browsing. Rinse and repeat :-)

27 points by ChildOfChaos 4y ago

I'm not on social media (Twitter, Instagram, Tiktok, fb etc) and I don't use my phone that often but I spend a lot of time on computers and tend to waste a lot of time on Reddit/HN/ simular sources.

LinuxBender 4y ago

My personal experience is to have a schedule. A vague outline of things I want to get done. I spend a little time on the internet in between jobs around the house or on the homestead. This allows me to take a break from having the entire world in front of my face and I get some sunlight to promote mitochondrial health. This has helped my sleep a great deal and keeps me physically active. After doing some heavy lifting and moving of things I come in, take a quick shower and then have a cup of lemon balm tea and see what the internet is up to. Like you, I also do not use social media beyond HN.

dflock 4y ago

I've found this Chrome/Edge extension very helpful: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/intention-stop-mindless-b/dladanhaondcgpahgiflodhckhoeohoe https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/intention-stop-min...

startupsales 4y ago

time blocking

klyrs 4y ago

Get off HN! (observe pot calling kettle black) It's hard, honestly, to do work on computers, because they're rife with distractions. When I want to read, I deliberately leave my phone in the other room. When I can, work things out with pen&paper, again, phone and computer in another room -- but it's rare that a problem I'm working on can be approached with pen&paper.

boredemployee 4y ago
That's why I bought an Amazon Fire 8 tablet. It's cheap, not a top device (less apps, less distraction), but still useful for reading pdfs, books and what not. I just love it for studying and reading books.

akprasad 4y ago

I found it useful to focus less on reducing time on computers etc. and more on increasing time on the things I really cared about. To use a food analogy: when a person has a great and satisfying meal, they have much less appetite to binge eat a bag of chips.

kradeelav 4y ago
100% agreed. To add what you mentioned about increasing time on the things you care about, personally found it helpful to link a purpose to those specific actions in my head and mentally state it. For example -- "I've been anxious lately, I should sit down and journal in my physical notebook for 5 minutes" or "I haven't taken a lot of play time to myself lately, let's go read something offline for 30 minutes." Re-framing it slightly so it feels like a practical suggestion to immediately do something from somebody else to myself helps break down a lot of the procrastinationation loops, imo. Triggers that "I want to be useful" feeling.
themadturk 4y ago
Indeed. I make a commitment to read more books this year, and started a reading diary to help me along, and it has worked. My book reading is almost exclusively digital (Kindle, reading also on iPad and iPhone occasionally). I also have almost entirely gotten off social media, helped by putting specific Twitter users and subreddits into my NewsBin feed, where it's much easier to avoid algorithm influence. I open the apps or websites only if I want to respond or ask a question.

TakeBlaster16 4y ago

Add whatever site is sucking up your time to /etc/hosts.

atwood22 4y ago
I do this too. It's pretty crazy how often I find myself staring at an error page wondering what happened.
pshushereba 4y ago
Forgive my ignorance, but what does this do? I'm interested. Would I just add Twitter/Reddit/whatever to the file with an IP of 0.0.0.0 so it throws an error or something?
- valbaca 4y ago
  When you go to a website, there's a DNS lookup to find the IP address to use for it. By setting this you can tell your computer "instead of actually going to HackerNews, go to [website] instead" https://linuxize.com/post/how-to-edit-your-hosts-file/ https://linuxize.com/post/how-to-edit-your-hosts-file/
- somenameforme 4y ago
  I prefer 127.0.0.1. That's a "self" IP that will redirect to your own machine. If you have no web server setup, it'll just give a 404/not found error. If you do have one, then you have some more creative options given you're visiting it as a result of going to site you're trying to wean yourself off of.

GekkePrutser 4y ago

Is it really a waste? I work in IT security and I find HN (and some other sites) very useful. Much insightful stuff in the comments. I spend a lot of time here especially when I don't have anything better to do but I wouldn't call it a waste. If you had been on Facebook etc then yeah that is a total waste. I think you're doing pretty well already.

somenameforme 4y ago
There's certainly plenty of great content here, but if you could see the hours you've spent on it, and it ended up amount to days, and weeks, perhaps months of time - it starts to become a consideration of imagining what else you could have done with that time. "If I'd spent those hours doing [x], I'd [insert desirable thing] by now!" Of course shit posting is often much more enjoyable than "doing [x]" or we wouldn't be doing it in the first place, so there's some life balance issues - but it's a real consideration nonetheless. I often wonder how many Einsteins went without ever truly finding their niche; not because of lack of development in some area, but because of it! The internet can provide endless addictive entertainment and enjoyment, even of a higher brow nature. It's easy to lose yourself in it.

toast0 4y ago

Use an LTE hotspot with a very small quota for fast data, and unlimited quota of slow data. You can still do everything you need, but everything will be awful, and you'll not enjoy doing anything you only want to do.

zmxz 4y ago

Log out. Reddit/HN are less appealing when you can't interact with someone, especially if you feel they're wrong and correct info needs to be supplied. If you really want to stop doing something, don't place yourself in a situation where it's easy to do so.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
senectus1 4y ago
Thats mostly true. but things like tik tok and youtube shorts are a cornucopia of trash that kills time and drags attention. I can only keep away by "internally" rating the whole platform as trash.

abawany 4y ago

The plugin Distract-Me-Not on Firefox really helped me define rules that helped discipline. I admit I sometimes defeat its rules, such as now, but that is cumbersome to do and time-limited. Excellent plugin.

gzer0 4y ago

I find myself in a similar situation: a constant cycle of information seeking as a form of procrastination itself.

vehemenz 4y ago

Your mileage may vary, but I've found it helpful to remove my browser's default search engine, so I can't search directly from the address bar. I also clear my cookies regularly so that logging into Reddit or Twitter becomes more deliberate. For Instagram, Tiktok, and Facebook specifically, my only recommendation is to delete your accounts and exercise abstinence. Worked for me anyway.

NanoWar 4y ago

Best way for me is to move the browser app icon to a different position (on mobile) so that I don't find it immediately. That way I hesitate a moment and sometimes don't start wasting time.

RomanPushkin 4y ago

I have the same problem solved for kid with coin dispenser and coin acceptor. Coin acceptor is connected right to OpenWrt router via USB. Once you put a quarter, it turns on Internet for 30 more minutes. Dispenser is connected to PC with the app where he has to solve (not very hard) math puzzles. When you reach the score of 10, the coin is getting dispensed. Internet usage is down 2-3 times now, compared to what it was before. Even if you have a router in another room with a single physical button attached via USB, you'll be lazy going to another room to turn the Internet on. Have a book by your place and you'll see how much you started reading. Reach out if you need OpenWrt router hacking help.

jfim 4y ago
Wow, that's a great idea, and it turns the Internet into a reward ("how can I use this limited resource effectively") as opposed to nonstop mindless scrolling. Is the router off for everyone when disabled or is it like an IP based block using the router's API to add and remove blocks on demand?
- RomanPushkin 4y ago
  There are two WiFi networks pretty much - one for work (provided by Xfinity), another one is an OpenWrt router WiFi, which is connected by WiFi to Xfinity WiFi.

davidhariri 4y ago

SelfControl.app

jonfw 4y ago

Personally, I blocked most websites on my primary browser on my work computer, and I set a maxvisit and minaway on my hackernews profile. So I get 20 minutes of slacking off on hackernews, and then I get booted off for a few hours, and the other time sucks are blocked. I've also turned off history auto-suggestions in my search/URL box, so that when I look for a website it only suggests relevant work locations I define in my bookmarks. I can (and often do) open a secondary browser to waste my time with, but I don't do it quite as impulsively. And when I'm ready to go back to work, I just kill that second browser window, and I've effectively removed myself from the distracting context

ChildOfChaos 4y ago
Ohh that is interesting, didn't know that Hacker news had this feature.

nend 4y ago

I block distracting sites/apps from 6:30am-6:30pm, with browser extensions/app blockers. It's a pretty simple and free solution, takes maybe 10 minutes to install and configure. Yes there are fairly easy ways to get around the blocks, but 90% of the time I'm able to respect the block and so it saves hours of time daily.

night-rider 4y ago

I sanction a brief window of time for the socials at night. I wear special 'computer glasses' that block blue light, and turn the brightness down on the device too. Blue light ruins sleep, so the less of it, the better. All my feeds are high signal, and I come out of it enriched, not drained or fatigued or feeling like I've wasted time.

1983054104 4y ago

I was like you before. You need to stop finding software solutions with your problems. Productivity blogs/fads/tools come and go. You need "discipline." That's all. Productivity is temporary, discipline is forever.

asldjajlfkj 4y ago

I can recommend the app ColdTurkey, if you use Mac or Windows. You can block sites permanently, in blocks or give yourself an allowance. It’s a lot tougher than /etc/hosts: Disabling it during a locked block is very hard. That’s perfect for me. I permanently blocked all news sites and gave me an allowance for HN. There are also extensions that remove the recommended feed from Reddit, so you can still interact with pages found from search, but can’t discover new content once on Reddit. That greatly reduces my time spent there.

Someone1234 4y ago

Unaffiliated but "Cold Turkey" for Windows/MacOS. They let you create a highly flexible schedule (e.g. lunch breaks), and even support Pomodoro Timers (e.g. 20 on, 20 off, etc). But the biggest feature is privacy respecting (i.e. non-cloud, non-sharing data with advertisers) and non-subscription. It is just an old-fashioned desktop application with several browser extensions. They have some nice website lists to save initial setup time like "social media" or "shopping" that will nuke all the big names. But they support wild cards or even application specific blocks. HN isn't in the "social media" list by the way. It is designed to be hard to bypass/disable/modify. Even how each individual block's settings are locked is very configurable, which is nice. The UI does suffer from the "invisible button" trend, so you'll have to figure out that there are three buttons under each block none of which look like clickable buttons (schedule config, break config, and settings-lock config). Also, the "On" button enables/disables the SCHEDULE rather than the block itself. So if a block isn't working after scheduling making sure it is "On" too. PS - No doubt I'll get crapped on by the "just self-control" crowd. I'd argue that if this problem was easily overcome, people wouldn't be making threads on the topic and continuing to have problems. I don't think application enforcement should be anyone's long term goal, I see it more like a Nicotine Patch, a temp middle-ground to help make achieving your goals easier.

_aavaa_ 4y ago

While the other comments are useful (either use more technology or self control) I don’t have think they really address the actual problem. Whenever I find myself doing this it’s always because I am avoiding something (either doing something or thinking about something). Find out what those things are, and deal with them.

Someone1234 4y ago
> Find out what those things are, and deal with them. That's up there with "just be more happy" (for depression), "just exercise," "just eat less food" (for obesity) in terms of being entirely unconstructive. Yes, chronic procrastination is an avoidance technique but "just do it" isn't actually an effective strategy to overcoming it. Here's a video that people suffering from this may actually find helpful: https://youtu.be/sYhQMR8FrKc https://youtu.be/sYhQMR8FrKc It offers actionable advice and strategies.
- _aavaa_ 4y ago
  My point wasn’t to say “just do it”, but rather “focus on this instead since it might be the actual problem”. The other advice given if “install this software to block sites” may not actually work since without the sites they’ll just find for another way to distract themselves

bryanlarsen 4y ago

LeechBlock browser extension.

haskell_melody 4y ago

Pipe all the sites you find yourself getting distracted on into /etc/hosts and redirect them to 127.0.0.1.

sidcool 4y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31426683 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31426683

NoMAD76 4y ago

1st I make use of uBlock Origin filters and I blocked all distracting sources (social media, reddit, etc) 2nd I also blocked via browser any images so I have only text 3rd I try to learn or read about things that fit into my interest zone while avoiding anything else 4th Since I live with my gf I try to spend as much time as possible with her (talking mostly), this way we're both off the distracting internet sources I value my time more since I'm in my mid 40s, I don't think I waste my time on the internet if I'm reading about something that (see point 3) When I was a child and right after high-school, the internet was either non-existent or not-accessible. But I do believe that it's the most beautiful thing invented in the last century, it's mind blowing how much can you learn/see/find if you don't waste your time into scroll/click spiral. If you know where to look/search, there are treasures everywhere on the internet.

hummerbliss 4y ago

I fould book Deep Work by Cal Newport enlightning on how to cultivate quitting social media (and other shallow work) and develop habit of deep work. How to Work Deeply ? How to decide on your depth philosophy ? Ritualize your deep work Make Grand Gestures Embrace Boredom Drain the shallows Quantifying the depth of the work you do.

nathants 4y ago

have your computer lock you out for 10 minutes every 35 minutes. forced breaks are good for getting exercise throughout the day. when you sit back down you can CHOOSE to go back to time wasting, or not.

marto1 4y ago

Go for a repeatable offline physical activity that engages all of your attention, e.g. chopping wood, hunting, fishing, a lot of sports fall into this category as well. Try to go for something that is easy to organize so you have more opportunity to rewire your brain a bit.

betwixthewires 4y ago

So the first step is to figure out if you're actually wasting time, and how much of the time you spend is actually a waste. We live in a pretty strange world, strange in a new way: we can interact with anyone in the world and we can learn anything we want with minimal effort. We can also endlessly be entertained passively if we choose to do that. You don't really think about it much, but before smart phones we had to set time aside and go sit at a desktop machine to use the internet, so you had to actually have something to do, or time to kill. Before the internet, we used to loaf around reading books, sipping on tea, flipping through television channels, and before television we used to have a ton of downtime. We didn't stress over the downtime that much because it was just a fact of life. Now that we can be productive in some way all the time due to the internet, we tend to think of the time we spend doing nothing as a waste, a new phenomenon brought on by phones, but it isn't really true. Human beings have always spent about half their waking hours loafing about. The ones that loved learning read book after book. It's never been easier to read book after book than it is now. So are you actually wasting time? What are you reading? Reddit has a very bad signal to noise ratio, especially as of late, but there's valuable stuff there. HN is quite a bit better, but still a lot of it will be uninteresting to some and interesting to others. I spend a lot of time reading on my phone. Books, articles, conversations on this site, and I've improved my vocabulary and command of the English language immensely, I've learned quite a bit on a wide set of topics, I can read Cyrillic and Greek phonetically and I can walk you through the particles in the standard model and what their properties are, I know a bit about information theory, and a bunch more. I couldn't dream of doing all this learning 30 years ago with just a public library available, it would've cost me hundreds of thousands of dollars and taken me insane amounts of time to source the material. I'd be sitting around watching TV drinking miller lite believing things like "if you ask a cop if he's a cop he has to tell you" because I'd have had no way to easily check if what someone told me was true. It's likely you'd have wasted more time if smartphones didn't exist. This idea that every waking moment needs to be productive is incorrect. Before smartphone you'd probably spend most of your free time watching TV and drinking beer. So if what you do on your downtime is rewarding, it's not a waste. And if you're like me and you soak up information like a sponge and love learning, these devices are a blessing. Just decide not to spend downtime doing things that aren't rewarding to you, downtime is not the problem, being unhappy with how you spend it is. Learning interesting things is certainly not a waste of time, and neither is watching egirls on twitch if that's what you enjoy, because you'd have been watching married with children reruns otherwise.

tomjen3 4y ago

A couple of things: 1. demand more. If a headline can't prove to you that it is relevant, it isn't. This essentially cuts out all click-baits, but that is just the start of it. If Twitter and/or Facebook doesn't _consistently_ provide value to you, they are out. I have a couple of people who insist on organizing things on Facebook, but I just check my notifications (on the site), I don't look at the feed because it does not provide enough value. Reddit is my big issue. I spent way too much time on r/news, r/ukraine etc so I have decided just not to visit reddit until september, then I will have to reevaluate it. 2. Intentionallity. Many sites can be very valuable or a complete waste of time. I have spent a lot of time on YouTube, but I have also gotten a lot of value out of it. I have also watched a lot of videos that were not very valuable. I definitely still struggle with intentionallity, but the idea is that you spend your time on something you want, not what diverse algorithms want you spend the time on. In general: your eyeballs are very important and I think it is fair that you demand a high price for your attention. That doesn't mean that you have to be productive at all times, being paid in fun is fine, being paid in aweinspiringness or whatever else you value is fine too. But demand a high price for your attention. The key is to note on how you feel afterwards: if you feel queizy and slightly-to full on regretfull, then you should change going forward. If you feel happy then, fine, you just spent a lot of time on something you enjoyed - there is no problem with that.

sys_64738 4y ago

Don't allow yourself to do anything non-work on work computers. Don't allow yourself to login to any reddit/HN/other sites from any computer. Disable networking on your computer when you need to use it for productivity. Basically put awkward barriers between you and the internet so you don't have an easy means to slip-up.

ravish0007 4y ago

Book suggestion: "Digital Minimalism" - Cal Newport

marto1 4y ago

What works best is small steps, I believe. First deal with your smartphone access. Delete all, but essential apps(e.g. your work) in your phone, you can still visit whatever you want on another device you don't carry around with you everywhere, e.g. a laptop. Do that for a month or until you feel ok about it. Start to do SOMETHING ELSE that is somewhat productive, e.g. a sport and is not browsing the internet. Make sure over time to up prioritize that activity and down prioritize browsing. Rinse and repeat :-)