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Donald Knuth says: [http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html] > Email is a wonderful thing for
by svat 17y ago
Donald Knuth says: [http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html]
> Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration. [...]
And Richard Stallman doesn't use a web browser: [http://lwn.net/Articles/262570/ http://lwn.net/Articles/262570/]
> For personal reasons, I do not browse the web from my computer. (I also have not net connection much of the time.) To look at page I send mail to a demon which runs wget and mails the page back to me. It is very efficient use of my time, but it is slow in real time.
Closer to here, Paul Graham also recommends Disconnecting Distraction. [http://www.paulgraham.com/distraction.html http://www.paulgraham.com/distraction.html]
Maybe we should try learning from them.
- csomar 17y agoI forgot something: My whiteboard and penciles, when I write on my whiteboard (standing up) I have a lot of concentration, I happen that a lot of times i plan and write code (or math) on the whiteboard and then recopy it
- mtoledo 17y agoI totally agree with their perspectives.. (maybe not going as far as not using a web browser, but I'm sure concentration is not his only reason for this). If you have a cellphone on which you received calls from people you follow on twitter everytime they tweeted, and a cellphone on which you received calls everytime you received an email, chances would be that you wouldn't be able to do around 5 minutes of work without being interrupted by a phone call. Therefore, if your activity required a longer period of concentration, chances are you wouldn't be able to achieve/complete it. Curiously, most people use the internet like they were those cellphones and then complain about it. The beauty of the internet and the computer is that you can bend it to your will, so you could turn it into a newspaper if you wanted to pay the 1 day delay, for instance.