Ask HN: How do you use your computer intentionally/deliberately?

2 pointsrajlego2y ago5 comments

Currently I'm trying to sort out my life, partially with meditation, partially with thinking/writing and partially with some reading. Computer is pretty helpful for the latter two but I also end up using it a lot to watch anime or spend time on discord. I don't mind this - if I don't relax with the internet I'll end up messing around some other way naturally.

But it bothers me how little awareness I have while using my computer. A lot of times I'll be doing something like using twitter and I won't even be enjoying it - I'm just trying to burn time. If I snapped out of it and checked in with myself for 20 seconds, I bet at least half the time I could find something I'd both enjoy doing more and that's marginally useful. But it's really hard to do this without just blocking most of the internet and I don't want to do that.

What do you guys do to deal with your computer useage?

5 comments

damnesian2y ago

Little coding projects, image manipulation with python libraries, LAMP (with sqlite) to catalog and serve music on the local network, analyzing my own text- blog contents, social media posts- looking for patterns- basically treating myself as an experiment and trying suck data out of my detritus for possible writing projects. Oh, also listening to shortwave radio and making simple multitrack audio recordings of my musical ideas.

It beats doing what you are talking about- dead scrolling random internet stuff just to "burn hours" (I've heard that before but still, what a sad sentiment).

0823498723498722y ago

I don't scroll anymore.

Entertainment —including HN— is pulled via RSS and presented as a list of plaintext, from which I actively select. The browser is open as long as I am actively searching (via engine or within-page search) for something, but if I find myself scrolling around passively, I close it.

rajlegoOP2y ago

How do you find HN via RSS less distracting than the site itself?

aebtebeten2y ago

When I accessed via https://news.ycombinator.com , I'd see the same stories repeatedly, just in different places, each time I visited that page. Via newsboat, I see each story at most once.

Also the HN frontpage scrolls on my laptop —if barely— but I have newsboat configured so that when there are too many new HN stories, I view them by subsets of alphabetical order (currently a-g, h-q, r-z but I should probably chop at e or f instead) so they will fit on a screen (~70 stories).

Some weeks I am involved enough with my personal projects that I forget to read HN for several days; in that case I have channels set up that show only 1, 2, 3, and 4 day old content — which can then be broken down by subsets, or manually even finer, so I'm only ever picking from less than a screenful.

(when I'm that far behind, I mostly mark entire screenfuls as seen, without clicking through at all: maybe the greatest value of this system is realising that one can very easily not click on attractive things and one's life is still full of more interesting things than one truly has time for?)

h2odragon2y ago

i use my window managers "workspace" feature.

Everyday idle time suckers go on the first workspace, the second only has actual "work". I'll switch to the 2nd workspace and try to have discipline about switching back to the "nonwork" workspace.

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