- setting long passwords to social media that aren't autofilled (saved in bitwarden) and logging out after each session
- nerfing addicting parts of webapps (plugins which block the facebook news feed but allow messaging/groups helped a TON)
- forbidding dedicated social media apps and only using "worse" internet sites
- router DNS blockers, even if I can get around them, the act of having to bypass it raises my awareness I'm doing something subpar for myself
Although if we are specifically talking about social media such as Facebook then I mainly advocate at this point just to dump it. You can still use the separate messenger app and function even with a fully deactivated account.
Instagram I found (for myself) relatively easy to spend a small amount of time on every few days but the amount of advertisements has just gotten insane. After not logging on for 3 days or similar it appears to now be giving me about 5 ads for each real post of someone I follow (half of these are "suggested posts" which are not true advertisements but are really not much different). You would think they would be able to track the fact that when they do this I almost immediately close the app and use it less. I am just amazed they do not start with at least a few page scrolls of no ads and then slowly transition them in.
If you need an extra push to enforce that you only use private browsing, you can install any browser extension that blocks sites and then tell your browser to not permit that extension to run in private windows.
At least we’re only losing time, not money. But we’re still losing health, by staying in bed too much because of social media…
You can then see how sick that algorithm is in recommending and pushing junk. Only now its junk you will despise.
- if you need an app, turn off notifications at least (and move it occasionally to another folder)
- turn on iOS Screen Time so you have that second to re-think if you want to use the app in the first place (pattern interruption)
- turn your phone colors to greyscale - I know it sounds odd but I had it like that for a couple of years or so and it made me reduce phone time, more productive and less stimulated by the phone (even for a good long while after turning it off)
Do you know why it worked for you?
- Get a really slow phone
I found my phone/news/Facebook addiction grew significantly when I upgraded my previous iPhone 4S (took a few seconds to unlock, another few seconds to open an app) to my current iPhone X (everything was/is instant). Previously I had used my phone as a tool, I had to really want to look at Facebook or Google a thing before opening it, now I just open it almost by muscle memory and the tsunami of news and Facebook just washes over me and I feel like I am powerless to stop it.
They make me focus on my intent to establish a habit.
Habit establishing requires perseverance in the face of a bit of bother.
The big hurdles are the big hurdles. Small frictions get smoothed by repetition…or by simply becoming ordinary parts of the process.
Willingness to do things that suck is the nature of positive habits.
To a first approximation if it doesn’t feel a bit unpleasant at first, it probably isn’t a positive habit.
I started using a Cookie AutoDelete plugin for privacy reasons; but it's also been great for this purpose, so I don't have to remember to log out.
Also, OP mentions that the Pomodoro timer didn't work for him. I find that the task of manually triggering the timer is a distraction and chore by itself; So I created a butt triggered productivity timer which starts automatically when I sit on the chair before my workstation and it has done wonders to my productivity and health(Taking a walk during break).
- delete browser bookmarks, desktop icons, "favorites" ...
It’s interesting how people, including myself, try to justify various addictions. How am I supposed to stay informed about important topics without the news? How do I know how to help people in need without knowing what’s going on? There are much, much better ways than reading CNN/NYTimes every day. Also, there really is nothing new about the human condition today compared to a hundred years ago.
‘This seems to be true, but the curious thing is that I’m never involved. The government commits a crime, the New York Times prints it on the front page, the people on the cable chat shows foam at the mouth about it, the government apologizes and commits the crime more subtly. It’s a valuable system — I certainly support the government being more subtle about committing crimes (well, for the sake of argument, at least) — but you notice how it never involves me?’
Me, currently I pay for a Guardian subscription, because I think it plays an important role in our democracy - although I don't actually read it.
I'm sorry but there just isn't any comparison. Have you ever read news about something you are an expert at? It's just laughable inaccurate.
News is entertainment, not information. If you want information, read a book written by an expert at the field.
Like it or not, engagement with civic society requires a person to be more current on what is going on in their towns, state and country than a book publishing schedule allows.
Besides, there's a lot of room in between experts' books and passively consuming whatever the top headlines are on any given day. You don't have to choose between infotainment news & a complete vacuum of knowledge about current affairs.
I'm inclined to prefer the book-readers too, but the way this is phrased sets up a bit of a false dichotomy.
Lots of stuff that's happening now and is of interest won't make it into books for a while. And there is something moderately interesting (and educational) about following along, thinking about where the world will go and why, and seeing if you turn out to be right a few days/weeks later.
For a while, my entire daily news consumption was just listening to the FT News Briefing [1] during my commute. It's about 10 minutes, and -- most days -- it was just the right amount of news.
I actively avoid news (to the point of changing channels on the TV and Radio when it comes on), and yet somehow I still managed to be kept aware of what's going on, and avoid being ignorant.
> It's like saying traffic lights distract you from driving.
It's actually more like saying every pedestrian in a city is going to jump in front of you when you're driving. You can be aware of pedestrians, cars, bikes, and be a careful considerate driver without needing to fear that every person is trying to jump in front of your car, in the same way that you can be an informed person without getting daily updates on the top 10 stories in the UK right now.
I'll now continue with my hot take: being informed, even being an expert, on anything outside your field of work is overrated, if not useless.
Say you've been following the recent war in great depth. Or the pandemic. Or US politics. You've invested hundreds of hours reading about it and have developed an understanding far above average.
Now what? What are you going to do with it? Debate online, a lost cause? What is the tangible benefit of understanding without purpose?
In general, I think reading news/forums is more for enjoyment/addiction than practicality, though.
You'll know the difference between what the history books will claim 20 years from now and the public debate shift based on that, and what you've actually witnessed.
Granted, you are (likely) not actually on the ground where the tanks and rockets and soldiers meet, but you are another layer or two closer to being a witness of history. Which you are not if you ignore it.
'Deliberately ignorant' is your value judgment. Spend some time in rural eastern Europe, and the perspective changes for the better. Media propaganda is simply unimportant.
In the actual argument they claimed that news wasn't the best information source in an argmax over sources on the basis that other mediums have selective pressures which more strongly correlate with utility generation - partly because of medium influences and partly because things which aren't new are subject to selective pressures for longer and thus the filtering mechanism of that selective pressure is more discriminating.
You aren't engaging with that argument, but you act like you are. So when you claim that no information is the alternative proposition you've actually made a mathematical claim: that the count(set{news, **other_sources}) == 0. This is clearly nonsensical because the minimum size of the argmax over information sources necessarily included news and so was obviously at least one, but often more. So your basically asking people who would agree with you on the basis of your argument to take on the claim that 0=N. Yet if it does then it follows that news doesn't exist in the set where you only get to choose news. So they have to not only believe that you are right, but also that news is not a source that they can choose, but this contradicts your premise.
Some questions to ponder to help you get it:
1. Why aren't you trying to refute the existence of evolution and natural selection?
2. Why aren't you trying to disprove that approximation accuracy is a function of the computation that goes into the approximation?
If you really thought you were right you would be trying to tear down the works of Charles Darwin and would be laughing at Donald Knuth for the stupidity of classifying things by computational complexity. Yet you aren't.
I'm surprised Aaron Swartz, of all people, had this view.
I don't think the human mind is designed to absorb all the worlds ills and misery, the news amplifies the worst of what's going on in the world and delivers it to you minute by minute, the only rational way of dealing with it is to either cut it out or become unspeakably cynical about it all.
It's more like saying that a mindset primed on "The Fast and The Furious" is not suitable for good driving.
I recognized that I was over consuming the news during the Trump presidency and needed a reset, and decided to not spend any more time reading the news than the short summaries that Axios posts and ignore all other forms (including John Oliver, although I do still watch Closer Look).
It appears that my actions and aspirations don't seem to be making the world a better place, but it is too depressing a thought to think that the best thing for me to do is be ignorant to the bad things in the world.
I plan on trying out subscribing to Delayed Gratification to see if that is a better path. https://www.slow-journalism.com/
Reading those once a day is actually pretty good, let's say at a dedicated time. In contrast to many-times-a-day-let-me-just-check-the-app. The latter is just causing dopamine rushes. The former keeps you informed.
What did you have in mind?
Only alarms to wake up
I know others probably can't do that, but it works great for me.
I've added my family members to that exception list, and leave the phone on do-not-disturb mode 24/7.
I deleted all apps that distracted me, Instagram, Facebook, Firefox, Email, Slack, Facebook Messenger, Telegram. I check the ones I care about on my laptop/desktop. I deactivated my Instagram/Facebook because I kept logging back into them and scrolling for a bit -- not for very long, but any free moment I'd look for entertainment there.
Any time I need some app, e.g. YouTube to show a video to a friend, or Uber to catch a ride, I'll download it and delete it once I'm done with my task.
I've found that my screen time has gone down drastically. I used to spend 3 hours a day on Instagram, Facebook, Hacker News. Now I spend closer to .75-1.5 hours, with about 50% of that being very difficult to trim down because it's mostly useful (1:1 texting, finding music on Spotify, using Maps). I still have HN, xkcd, and the NYT for reading, but that's not much more than 15-20 minutes of my day, which I think is acceptable.
I also put my phone in grayscale with reduced white point. This makes it much less enjoyable to read, and reduced white point makes it much more difficult to see/use, which reduces the time I spend.
It's a lot of effort, but it's so easy to get sucked into your phone. Every little moment when I'm bored I'd pull it out and look for something. It's so much more valuable to be doing nothing, and to not be controlled by little notifications on my phone when something happens.
I wish I could get an absolutely stripped down iPhone. I want Maps, Spotify, Messages, Phone, CarPlay, and that's about it. Maybe it would let me switch profiles for travel that has extra apps, or to some entertainment mode with a time-delay (e.g. if I wait 5 minutes I can open up Netflix). Something like the Light Phone [0] seems interesting, but not having CarPlay is a non-starter because I find it so useful. I suppose I could have two iPhones -- one for everyday carry that is barebones, and a second with the rest of my apps that I can keep in a drawer 95% of the day, but that sounds just so wasteful.
(Tongue in cheek! I love HN. I just know that I sometimes do abuse it as a procrastination device.)
“Facebook doesn’t count because I only use it to keep track of what people I know are doing.”
That has to be right up there with the number of times I have heard “I don’t use Facebook, I only use Instagram”.
Not trying to knock the author but the time window is simply too small and this approach is simply too common online. Let’s see if the author can actually change lifestyle for more than 5 years and then we can discuss about “lessons learned”.
Also, I'm sure it's been longer than 3 days since they've found these things worked for them. By 5 years, they're likely going to forget their struggle.
That's not exactly infrequent. HN doesn't change all that much in a whole day.
noprocrast:
maxvisit:
minaway:
delay:
another "threat" is when you have a few kids, your daily life is cut into pieces with random and sometimes strong background noises 24x7x365, not much you can do there.
personally, that impacts my focus the most and there is no cure, and it usually lasts for about 20 years when kids are finally into colleges.
obviously there are many good stuff out of raising kids, and I enjoyed it, but focus-on-tech-advancement is not one of them.
They can definitely be a distraction, but I was able to minimize it by having an office with a door + setting reasonable boundaries. Also, they're out of the house at school for many hours (except for COVID -- that was a bit tougher, but that was the case for everyone).
I have no regrets. One of the reasons I WFH is to have less time on the road and more time w/ family. My oldest has said that he's glad I WFH, and that he didn't like me being away when he was younger.
Of course, every person/family is different. But for me & my family, I think minimizing the distractions in other ways while WFH + accepting the remaining distractions was worth it in the end.
I have a private office in our home and know that's not a luxury for many others, but the quality of life as a parent working from home vs being in the office is dramatic. With the kids home during the summer the noise and distraction levels do go up, but honestly are still less bothersome then the open office floor plan I was in previously. I think it really depends on your home situation as well as how your office was setup, but my guess is that a majority of parents would prefer remote positions if available.
The best rule I’ve put in place is work happens during the day or it doesn’t happen.
Sometimes I only want to price compare something online and order it, which should be a 5-10 minute process. It’ll take me 30 minutes spread over 10 3-minute bursts.
In between I need to end fights, clean faces, fetch out of reach toys, lift them out of a chair, lift them into a chair, no the other chair, hand them a stuffed animal, pick the stuffed animal up from the ground, clean food from the floor…
By which time I just order on Amazon. Yes maybe I pay more but at least I can order in one click and be done with it…
I had kids relatively young for a yuppie male (27) and while that was 100% the “right time” I would have done it earlier if I had known how great they are.
I’m turning 33 next month and really want children. I have endless memories of my dad and grandfathers teaching me amazing lessons and being best/strongest men I have ever been around. I want to fulfill that role that for someone! We didn’t have much money but camping or diy building is something fondly reminisce on and made me who I am.
My partner is 25 and is not decided on children yet due to also growing up poor and and having a rougher realationship with their fam. We’ve lived together a year now but she recently got an IUD and was happy about the ‘10 years of freedom’.
To her kids is a ‘probably after I finish all my goals/traveling’.
We were recently vacationing in Barcelona and met 3 young boys at the hotel and played a game of uno with them in the lobby. They lived in the Bay Area and I imagine their parents were techies, they were indian, 6-12yrs, long hair, well spoken, had skateboards, and wearing tie dye.
I CANNOT stop thinking about them.
I’m considering an ultimatum but I love her so much.
Sorry for the rant HN, I just needed somewhere to say it.
I'm in my mid 30s with no kids - while I can see that my career happens to be more advanced than close friends who had kids early, the signal to noise ratio is pretty high.
I'd think about it this way: enjoy the path you've set yourself on and savour the years where you have both your kids and your health. When they become less dependent on you, the option to lean in to a career is still available, and with a few more grey hairs you probably won't have to work so hard to prove yourself to begin with.
Competing with single people is incredibly depressing. (I have to find a way out of this hell hole, I hate tech)
The "mid" positions often require a grind. For example to get a skill.
The "top" positions often are a new set of hoops that you need to jump. First you need to actually get the position: what sometimes is about who you know, sometimes about what you do, sometimes sheer luck (e.g. those above you quit) or by just grinding and applying everywhere. Also at some point a new hoop are sales. Nobody cares that you cant do your job if you can bring in new customers worth millions.
In many ways life is pure luck. If you choose the right company you can get options and become a millionaire while someone better will rot in a failed startup (If you are in Europe you are out of luck - generally no options).
Maybe you start a company while you are still relatively young? Many did. Many failed. There are also those motivational lists who show billionaires who started a company after a certain age.
I was thinking of writing a book about this, but I am not sure if there is a market for that. Since what I wrote above sounds a lot like those sharlatan self help books.
[0] https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
Some peers can get big career boosts due to nepotism or networking and switching companies. Others leave a large company, giving up the chance of promotions to senior management, and create their own startup or join another at a senior level for advancement. Other people change industries and start at a junior position. Yet others decide to work a stable job for lesser pay, maybe at certain departments or agencies in the public sector.
I honestly don't see where competition with peers becomes a factor, so long as you're working enough to maintain valuable skills that hiring managers and organizations are looking for.
Sure there are sacrifices to be made with respect to career options. You can't (or shouldn't) just move cities every three years when a new job comes up, but working remotely can level that playing field quite a bit.
Anecdotal evidence: PhDs with children often are just as productive if not more than those without. Most PhD students are inefficient due to not focusing and thinking they infinite time.
In that limited study, if you're female you'd be expected to catch and over-take your peers -- presumably early child-rearing gives you more time after you've overtaken your peers. Again, from the study, if you're male then your output would be expected to be "better" from just after your kids come. Mother's were more productive before they became pregnant, if you follow; perhaps trying to get ahead before pregnancy.
If anyone asks I'll dig out the link. My work shared it, it showed the opposite of what they said it did ...
Also, be careful of playing games where people are willing to give up more than you are. For me, I don't derive as much meaning from a career as I thought I would, probably because I put too much expectation that it would provide that.
"Designing Your Life" is a book based on a Stanford course on career planning that explored this idea very well. A summary is at [0], and a relevant idea is that focusing on one area of your life is likely not sufficient for a good life. For example, over the course of a week, it can be useful to make sure you are hitting goals in "work, play, love, and health." It can sound like common sense, but it's useful to consciously do this, especially for people inclined to optimize for just work, at the expense of physical health and relationships.
An anecdote that stuck out to me was a positive example about a person who rose to a high level at a large company, then kept refusing promotions because he finally struck a good balance between career and having time for family. I'm sure this may not always be the best idea, but I liked the idea behind inclusion of the anecdote, which is that continuously climbing the career ladder may not actually be helpful for one's personal goals.
What if being distracted is not a bug but a feature and his mind doesn't want to continue the path of constantly writing books? Instead of eliminating distractions, it could be more helpful to find the activities that don't create the desire for distractions.
> In lab animals, isolation has been shown to cause brain shrinkage and the kind of brain changes you'd see in Alzheimer's disease — reduced brain cell connections and reduced levels of brain-derived neurotrophic factor, which is important for the formation, connection, and repair of brain cells.
https://www.health.harvard.edu/mind-and-mood/how-isolation-a...
(RSS feed available)
It is impossible to have an objective and bias-free source of information, simply because the amount of information that exists is unimaginably enormous. It's impossible for any single human mind to absorb everything that's happening, so we have to rely on services whose job is filtering that information into a small set of important bits.
By selectively choosing which bits of information you share or emphasize, multiple different sources can all technically be telling the gods honest truth, while also all pushing completely contradictory narratives.
Everyone is pushing a narrative, and it's critical that we all try to understand the incentives of the pushers of information we ingest.
>But there is no such thing as a pure fact, innocent of interpretation. Behind every fact presented to the world—by a teacher, a writer, anyone—is a judgment. The judgment that has been made is that this fact is important, and that other facts, omitted, are not important.
But this an exaggeration. Some people are truly equivocal on a question, yet still able to muster the effort to write about it.
One way this happens is that some specific issue puts the author's internal values in tension. An example would be recall/impeachment of some corrupt official, where the tension is between the two goods of removing the bad actor from power, and maintaining the norm of orderly transition of government power.
What is great about Wikipedia's "Current events" portal is that you don't have to sift through tweets that are selected by the news feed algorithm to make you angry, or a stream of op-eds that are selected by an editor to do the same, in order to get to the facts. Much healthier psychologically while still staying reasonably informed.
For example, AllSides includes Breitbart as a source. While it identifies it with the maximum value to the right, it doesn't give a barometer of credibility. For a reader deciding whether Breitbart is worth reading, one should closely examine credibility, not just political leaning. PolitiFact and Media Bias/Fact Check discussed the credibility of Breitbart at length [0] [1].
Then for ground.news, the way it portrays bias is also relatively simplistic. The most prominent indicator is left/center/right, but biases have a lot more nuance. It's more useful to account for how certain publications take certain policy stances. Leanings can be anti-establishment, pro-establishment, socialist, neoliberal, pro-consumption (e.g. Wired), or anti-consumption, and this information is lost when relying on left-center-right categorizations.
The best way to do this is to manually select a few publications that are high on factual credibility, write down their specific biases or leanings, and compare stories across the personally-curated selection of publications. You then personally have more control and understanding of the articles you are presented.
[0] https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/jul/28/stella-imm...
My family stuff is what keeps me going though. My work is a basket case at the moment, 12-month contract ends in 4 weeks, and it's almost a full time job applying for jobs.
I've had three managers in my not-quite 12 months, none that I've worked with very closely, one that thinks I'm no good because I unwittingly stepped on the toes of a couple of institutionalized colleagues by "doing my job", who complained to this guy who'd been my boss a total of less than a week at the time.
"Just do what you're told" was his advice. So, what you're saying is coast until the contract is over? Done and done.
Makes it hard to get a good recent reference though, lucky the market is thirsting for warm bodies.
I had 7 or 8 managers over the past 2.5 years. I picked up and completed several extra stories over the previous couple sprints only to recieve negative feedback that it wasn't what they wanted me to work on, even though I asked them if there was anything specific they wanted me to do next and had recieved no response. Oh, and my company will not allow managers to give employees recommendations/references at all.
Unsolicited advice: if you can, wait for September to really start looking for employment. August is slow season in recruitment because people are still on vacation while September is the last month of the quarter, so recruiters have targets to reach for the projects scheduled to start in Q4.
P.S. Australia's Reserve Bank is a couple of hours away from raising interest rates again. Currently it's sitting at 1.35%, expectation is for a 50 basis point increase.
Even in orgs that have their stuff together, I see a preference for internal transfer over termination. I think it's some sort of HR sunk cost fallacy.
In this market, we can't seem to hire anyone (we aren't competitive on salary). So I guess it makes sense that they want to keep the low performers since they wouldn't be able to backfill. This still sucks since there's a lot of stress dealing with poor ratings and not know if you will get fired. And then even if you do work hard and perform well, there'd no guarantee that will increase your rating or comp.
At the moment I burned money/got into a lot of debt trying to get a start up going. When that failed I just grabbed the first job/company that gave me an offer. I'm not that pumped about what I do but I can deal with it for now. Pay is still good for my level (low six figs) and it's 100% remote.
And don't be the weakest link in the (faulty) chain. It's leaves a better impression by notifying external inefficiency and quitting because lack of change, rather than being fired because your motivation and productiveness withered in silence.
We've all probably worked with people who will only lift a finger if it benefits them. Create an organization of people with this mindset and much of the necessary but un-glorious work never gets done. I suppose you could say people can play the long game and do that stuff in hopes of getting noticed, but if it doesn't and you have a transactional mindset, it's a recipe to be miserable. (We've probably all worked with those people too - the ones who feel slighted because they believe they've done all the hard work without getting rewarded).
It's also absolutely possible to create an ugly monster of organization while cheering up your team with whatever we-change-the-world mission.
I've done a lot of the work that nobody else wants to do. It wasn't any harder than the work others do. So it's not like I want to be rewarded more than them, but just not penalized for it. People who joined the company around the same time as me are managers and leads. I'm a midlevel. I've even filled the role of a lead for a year, but politics made it so my manager couldn't give me a high rating. After 10 years you'd think I'd at least be a senior and have a salary of $100k. I don't think I'm asking for the world here, and certainly many of the other 10 year employees are farther along because they're better than me.
Unless you want to get promoted into management...
Hire new people to do the inglourious work.
To add, I started treating most information outlets, including HN, as endless faucets of propaganda, misinformation AND misdirection. The outrage is, at best, a farcical play of human dramas unfolding on a stage. To take any of this seriously is borderline pathological.
It's much more sinister than most people suspect.
https://www.amazon.com/Stolen-Focus-Attention-Think-Deeply/d...
I was spending hours per day on Twitter, and then I learned that overusing social media rewires your brain, and you essentially unlearn to digest information in bigger chunks. This book will horrify you, and that's exactly what needs to be done.
And if a book (to listen to) is too much for you to focus on - listen to Ezra Klein's interview with the author, at least: https://podcasts.apple.com/nz/podcast/its-not-your-fault-you...
A good summary thread is here : https://twitter.com/DrMatthewSweet/status/147912591089697587...
Does that make him biased - of course, but whether or not the study of how topics get covered faster across decades was peer reviewed is rather unimportant. What I know is that I was able to read half a book in one session, and now I am struggling with a single page.
If you go back and watch the news from 2-3 weeks ago it is amazing how much of it is just nonsense. It's especially hard to go back and watch covid discussions from a year ago and hear just how wrong most information was.
Knuth has a secretary which prioritizes his snail mail. I think filters are a great way to go. I have tried to pre-bin my mail but my tray organizer has just been covered over with assorted cruft, which kinda makes the system untenable until I stop procrastinating...
We forget that our actions determine outcomes. The imperative to act lies solely on the individual. Most notifications systems have been designed based on UI/UX dark patterns to "maximise" interaction. Instead, I see the younger generation slipping into a complete lack of concentration.
My way to handle the onslaught of notifications is to keep them switched on for family instead. Work colleagues get a different tone (I use Telegram) because it's cross platform and inherits notification settings from the main applications.
This way, it helps boost my interaction. It offers me tabs to organise my intake, and all high post channels are archived, which I rarely check. I use Inoreader extensively; use Twitter lists to follow specific accounts (that add to my knowledge base) instead of following futile "success stories" or "collaboration" or "publications".
It’s common that folks with ADHD will use Caffeine, it just doesn’t work as well as other stimulants for many people.
I've been drinking at least 2 cups of coffee ("cups" is a fuzzy measure) for maybe 15 years. Maybe I should power through the withdrawal and discover for myself if I've accidentally been undermining my mental clarity and life quality this whole time, instead of giving myself energy and helping concentration as I'd been assuming.
Staying healthy.
Documentation, journaling, meditation, reviewing -- they're all different aspect of the same, uh, something.
Thinking and writing a plan before doing anything complicated. Sensing when something might be complicated.
Trusting the right people with the right tasks.
Trading money for time.
Picking my battles well.
Finding prior art.
Knowing when to learn a better way (tool, language).
Knowing when to automate.
Lacking creativity when it comes to leisure.
I remember some users deliberately not connecting internet to their homes to stick with this. There were also some users who switched to "dumb" phones to reduce distractions. I guess these could work.
[0] https://www.tigerdroppings.com/rant/tech/facebook-app-and-un...
It seems strange to disregard the pandemic merely because it didn't impact your work environment. It very likely impacted the ability to do any of their usual activities that took place outside of their home. And even if it didn't, having the entire world go through such a disaster is a reasonable possibility for a subtle or subconscious reactions.
This may not at all have been the cause, but neither is it inconsistent with their eventual solution of drastically reducing news/media consumption. If the awful things going on in the world were in some way impacting motivation & productivity then it certainly makes sense that turning them off might help.
Chalking up the mere possibility of that as "bogus excuses" is extremely dismissive for a global crisis as well, and a bit insulting to people who probably had identical issues that were very much linked to society shutting down combined w/ awful news creeping into any glance towards the outside world. The author's next statement of "“You’ve got to do something about that,” is the right attitude to take when faced with a problem of this sort, but a reason for a problem only becomes a "bogus excuse" if it's used to avoid trying to find a solution, not for its own sake.
> I find myself able to get around normal browser-level blockers fairly easily.
You're still just 30 seconds away from disabling the rule.
There's some sort of stigma agaiinst people who don't follow the news but I ask, what positives doesfollowing the news brings to your lifes?
I realized none and there is a huge proven link between following news and anxiety/depression.
Sadly I felt back to watching news with the war in Ukraine.
[1] Text mostly (90+%). Those few occasions I want to see images as part of a web page it's possible to turn that on.
Suffering from some adhd-like symptoms I used to be happy to be distracted. Now I'm even unhappy when a coworker wants something. AND I don't enjoy gaming... which is weird and frustrating because I consider myself addicted to video games.
One critic warns though. Nmn if overdosed might suppress methylation which then can lead to shitty outcomes after a few weeks.
Nmn is just refined vitamin b3, thiamine I think?
That's why I decided to try b-complex first (no overdose ). I found it works fine, back pain diminished, mood feels stable.
I deleted facebook years ago for the same reason, but I convinced myself that reddit was different in some capacity, and it is in ways, but after one too many evenings of looking at "Nothing", I'm happy I've kicked it to the curb. Even at work now, I have a ublock rule to block reddit. Occasionally, I find the need to temporarily allow it due to searches on a particular topic, but it's gone as a pastime.
Like the Rust subreddit has really good discussion and it's harder to keep up on Zulip, etc.
It is advice worth following, I think, though not so easy a lot of the time. My main trick for online distraction avoidance is to use separate computers for goofing off and for getting work done. Needless to say, reading HN or posting on it = goofing off.
Our brain is primordially designed to react to distractions - because it was a matter of survival or death. Media has adapted itself to harness this feature of our brains. To counter it, we have to take out much of the possible avenues to distractions out of our extrapersonal space or sight range (because we're visual creatures, out of sight = out of mind).
For more details, Andrew Huberman has a whole episode on focus and concentration that talks about this.
For me, it's sleeping enough, nicotine patches, green tea, L-Tyrosine, Avmacol, and no coffee. This regimen has helped me improve my work performance significantly. It doesn't "fix" everything, but it sure makes it so much easier to function and to focus what I want to focus on.
But lately (since a month ago) I have been thankfully able to maintain a 12/1-8:30 range sleep pattern.
I do a 15 min workout 5 days a week. I have been fasting so I eat a big meal a couple hours before sleeping. Read a book half an hour before sleep.
So far it's been working. Fasting is weight loss reasons. Also helps me personally focus since if I eat too much I get lazy/tired.
Other thing I'll comment on is regarding personal projects. I lay out a plan, when the day begins (weekend) I don't open anything (social media) I just immediately work on this project. Thankfully I can dump the most of the weekend days toward the project.
I'm still too much on HN, but since I strictly browse to https://news.ycombinator.com/over?points=200 it's much better.
- removed all social media apps from phone
- lock down all access to apps (screen time) and not know the password (give it to someone else)
- only allow photos, podcasts, spotify, navigation and the dial/SMS app
Screentime went from a few hours per day to about 15 minutes or so. But it has also changed my mood for the better. I still have to find a way to do the same thing on my desktop which is a lot harder (I need a browser)
I think the things that do change your perspective forever though are philosophy and even other's philosophies on attention in general.
Reading books like "Four arguments for the elimination of television" and "Amusing ourselves to death" changed how I view our attention.
Reading older books like "tao te ching" or "meditations" gave me perspective into how much my attention matters.
I disagree with that statement. I know it's fashionable on HN to spit on Reddit, but for all its flaws, Reddit also birthed fantastic communities that are hard to replicate somewhere else due to the network effect, e.g. /r/WarCollege, /r/hoggit, /r/AskHistorians, /r/Rust, /r/LinguisticsHumor, etc. – come for the dumb memes, stay for the niche communities.
> Lifting the phone should not unlock it. This setting is called “Display & Brightness/Activate on Lift” on the iPhone
On my phone it's called "Raise to Wake". I didn't know that you could turn this off, but I just did so because it's inconsistent and sometimes doesn't work. I like predictable behavior, even at a minor cost to convenience.
I'd love to see someone write a blog post about why they think their own content is good for others to consume while the content that they were willfully consuming was not.
Here is what he should have done: replaced his smart phone with a dumb phone if possible. It does not mean he gets rid of the smart phone but deactivate it. And have two computers: one for business and one for leisure and keep in different rooms. If possible disconnect the work computer from the web. That way there are fewer possible distractions. It's not enough to just remove apps. The device itself is addictive.
We are what we read: https://tinygem.org/about#stopnews
Entire TinyGem service was created with the purpose of collecting content worth reading.
"I won a lot of time back so that I can go back to writing 15 novels" is a little off putting for many.
Start simple with usage of your reclaimed time. Put your phone in another room and watch a 2 hour movie, uninterrupted. That's a thing a lot of people today can't even do, so already an accomplishment.
Even pure boredom, doing absolutely nothing, is healing. The point is that you have uninterrupted time, it doesn't matter if you spent it "productively".
I am currently going through the steps proposed by him and while not easy, it generally supports the point of the article.
That said, it is not just news.
edit: Just in case. No connection to the author other than being a happy reader.
Amusingly, as a result of all this re-arranging I did as a result of the book, I restarted writing a book for my kid. Not a lot, but a little bit each day should an inspiration strike.
It helps to allow mind wander a little.
TLDR: I don't disagree with your point, but I think it may have been a conscious decision beyond fiscal considerations.
For those with fear of missing out on current affairs — events are really only worth knowing about if someone has made you aware of it in real life. Otherwise it’s likely not that important.
Very good. Spiegel Online - unfortunately - became terribly bad over the last years, with click-bait headlines, sensational reporting as well as pushing fear & anxiety throughout their articles.
go https://hckrnews.com/ -> set "top 10%"
Finally I have free time to relax and do nothing!
It’s a dystopian nightmare, that you would voluntarily request this.
...if y’all catch my drift here ;)
I keep my phone on DnD 100% of the time and ruthlessly disable notifications, but have a semi-smart watch that vibrates for texts/calls. I'm still addicted to checking my news feeds but at least they aren't literally yanking my attention.
iPhone keyboards have built-in swipe typing now.
That is a news equivalent of junk food. Clickbait partisan outrage generator.
I would suggest some independent podcast with daily or weekly summaries. Much higher information density.
I think a more useful thing is to filter news down to only that news which is important rather than merely engaging, and leave engagement for either friends or hobbies with a ratio depending on your personal level of introversion/extroversion.
There is no value for me there. Even if I invest time into filtering, there is no value to gain from that. Maybe it is important, but I am not policy maker or investor, it is not important right now for me!
I can find out about that visit week later, after it actually happened. Without all the speculations and opinions. And since it will be podcast I can listen while running or exercising, and with much lower investment from my side.
Does CNN have any content that's genuinely important to you?
But the argument also applies to podcasts: no value in any fact-based podcast if you don't act on the information it gives you, just as there's no point in fiction-based podcasts if they don't entertain you.
I think the issue here is not the problem with news in itself but rather the consumption of news. I think what is problematic is that people are consuming news like they would consume posts on a social media platform in that they're endlessly scrolling few news stories, and keep checking the app to make sure they're on top of everything that is happening. And I completely understand how problematic this is. However, that is not to say that news itself is bad.
There are several reasons that lead me to come to this conclusion. While I'm sure not everything in the news might not be directly relevant to you, I think it helps you make better life choices when you know the state of the economy, and issues others are facing. But, I think, most importantly: it is democratically empowering to be aware of the news. Let's take the UK system of government as an example. Some things are obvious: we vote for our representatives (MPs) every 5 years at the most, and this is one opportunity to influence government but its not the only one. We can: write letters to our MPs; create, and sign petitions; join pressure groups; protest; take industrial action etc. But we can only do this effectively when we have a good awareness of current affairs. Additionally, in the UK we also vote for our local government as well. This can include councillors, and (if your area voted for it) directly elected mayors. I hear many people complain about what their local council are doing, but a lot of these people don't even vote for any councillors. I once went for a coffee, and told the person at the till that I was volunteering at the council election. His response? "I didn't even know there was an election on today." Many of us are fortunate to live in countries with the right to vote amongst other civil liberties. We ought to use them effectively in order to improve living standards for us all.
On the topic of how we consume news, if we feel it is unhealthy to scroll through a constantly updated app, we can turn to bulletins instead. In the UK, the BBC produce half-hour bulletins on weekdays at 1, 6, and 10 o'clock (shorter bulletins also exist at similar times on the weekend). You could watch, say, the 6 o'clock news in the evening, and then be done with news for the day. You could also read a newspaper. This doesn't have to be in print as some newspaper websites are either not updated frequently (e.g. The London Times/Sunday Times which is only updated for major breaking news, or in the evening to give articles for tomorrow's paper), or provide a webpage that just shows you what was printed in that day's edition of the print newspaper (e.g. The Guardian/Observer).