It's well past midnight, I've been interacting with apps designed to maximize 'user engagement' since 8 PM. I don't have coherent thoughts, I'm opening irrelevant tabs habitually. This is not healthy. I have a problem. That problem is mindless browsing, and it feels engineered.
Not saying you're wrong, just that your ideas don't work for me.
>How could someone realistically use the modern Internet and still avoid content that starts them down unwelcome paths? (A secular analogue might be suicide ideation.)
The bottom line is that you have to create a strong break that prevents inattentive browsing or "doom scrolling." I think the lowest impact version of that would look like something where you write out exactly what you're opening your browser for (and then stick to that.) A more severe implementation would be getting rid of your smart phone and only having browsing on a PC in a common space.
Alternatively, you might get mileage out of a system that broke you out of bad patterns early rather than trying to keep you out initially. For example, an AHK script that throws a pop up every 10/20/30 minutes to ask what you're working on.
There's more complexity than just "unwelcome path", and you would have to choose your method to match your particular problem.
> This is an interesting concept, but it still requires self control. I could browse all day if I wanted but I WANT to get more work done, but I cant help it.
It doesn't require that much self-control as you may think. The important part is to control that 'first' desire of looking at your phone or opening up distracting sites.
What I found is that if I can curb that first desire to get distracted, then the rest of everything is super easy. But if I can't curb that first desire (which usually happens on Mondays), then I have to write that day off to non-productivity.
I started this project last November, and coincided with shutting down Facebook notifications (which helped me a lot). Two weeks ago I uninstalled Facebook mobile app and now I only check facebook by logging into the web version.
Does that work for you? Do you think it works in general? I do get the impulse to click on a link - and you are claiming that having to activate something (like I would do with uMatrix, I suppose?), makes you cognitively pause?
I guess we're all wired differently. That one doesn't seem to be a challenge to me (although, I can assure you that there are other unhealthy things that I wish I could figure out how to stop doing).
The article offers you the choice to keep mindlessly browsing. What we have now it's not really an option. This would be like nutritional warnings for apps.
Thanks for reminding me to turn on screen time on my phone. I am indeed wasting a lot of time on my phone reading things that don't get me much value while procrastinating on real work or things that I consciously want to spend my time on. This problem is a lot more prevalent on my phone than on my laptop. I catch myself browsing HN without any intent and without any goal, mostly reading comments and skimming on articles. It's a complete waste of time and I'm not really getting anything from it. I wish I could come once a week and get a synthesis of what's been happening over here. There are a lot of things that I absolutely don't care about at all and filtering on categories would help me skip those. I noticed that the top 30 or 60 items on HN move rather slowly and one visit a day is enough to not feel that you're missing out. I feel that I need outside help to regulate these behaviors.
This became a bad habit for me too, and there are limits to how fast I can make things. My solution was to install an app (Focusapp in my case) that blocks distracting websites. And I mean blocks them hard - reboot won't stop it. And it's on a schedule, so it blocks from 7am-5pm, every day.
It sounds a little heavy handed, but it made a huge difference.
- Use focus app block every website which can distract me
- Leave a "low hanging fruit". I can start the day with a very small and simple task and have some success in a couple of minutes. Getting into it is easier that way
I disagree - often adding a barrier to entry can help a lot. For example, I've found Forest app [1] to be successful at stopping me from using my phone as a time waster when I start to seek a distraction.
I'm increasingly finding that I have to actively struggle to take ownership of my time and attention. Without an active, conscious, effort to reclaim your mental resources you WILL be caught up in the never-ending cycle of dopamine-dependency to novel information or visual stimulation. Your attention is a valuable resource and many companies have spent billions on figuring out how to farm it.
Some of my more effective methods have included: strict site-blocking via OpenDNS, apps to implement time based blocking of information-novelty sites (Twitter, HN, reddit, instagram, CNN), almost complete disabling of notifications, with the exception of text messages and async work chat during business hours.
All of these methods, I can undo, but it prevents or at least slows down the automatic, reflexive app/site opening when my reptile brain craves a dopamine hit.
As someone with significant attention problems, apps like Instapaper and later Pocket were a LIFESAVER and probably saved my career from mediocrity.
My brain craves constant stimulation and distraction. Do 30 mins of coding? Okay you've earned 5 mins of hacker news. The problem is those 5 minutes are never 5 minutes when you come across a bunch of really interesting articles that your brain is dying to consume instead of getting back to work.
In the old days, I'd use del.icio.us, but that got out of hand. So, more often than not, I simply would take the time to read the posts, and my 5 minute breaks would become 20 minutes. I was a young hotshot developer and I could still manage to get my work done in half the day - truly. But I didn't grow.
So, first, I got older (and slower). Second, web articles got longer. And my model no longer was sustainable.
Now, what do I do? I just skim the article, note if it's something i should read, and add it to my pocket.
Do I then get the collector's fallacy side effect? Absolutely. But it's the lesser of two evils.
It's a nice sentiment, but the products/sites/apps that aim to suck our attention are designed to exploit human weaknesses via dopamine release, variable reward etc. (see the book Hooked), making it exceedingly difficult and potentially expending your finite store of willpower on things you could much more easily avoid altogether.
Personally, cultivating the self-control to avoid checking facebook.com is less interesting to me than editing my hosts files to block it, and using my willpower for more rewarding tasks (exercise, learning piano etc.)
Thanks. It's funny you say that, because I made this after making a 1-page website and then a mobile app. People liked those, but engagement cratered because people had no reason to open up a whole new website or app just to discover new books.
So I made this to solve that. To each their own!
Regarding distraction...it's a personal thing. I've been running the extension on my own browser for a few days and I usually just ignore it when I open a tab with purpose.
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After years of trying various methods, I broke this habit by pitting my impatience against my laziness. I decoupled the action and the neurological reward by setting up a simple 30-second delay I had to wait through, in which I couldn't do anything else, before any new page or chat client would load (and only allowed one to run at once). The urge to check all those sites magically vanished--and my 'productive' computer use was unaffected.
Earlier this year a link on HN introduced me to Clearspace (no association). It does exactly this. When I load an app, it forces a time delay and asks me to set the time I want to spend in it.
I've found this remarkably effective. Much more so than previous attempts to simply cold-turkey.
Thank you! I definitely observed a similar pattern using distraction blockers; it worked for a while, but after a while I just ended up wasting just as much time, except on different websites or on devices where the blocking wasn't enabled.
The real "cure" is just mindfully deciding not to open "unproductive" apps and sites. Otherwise, my time-wasting workflow (hah) just naturally adapts after a while.
Once you develop a habit of doing something, it can be tough to drop the habit without something to interrupt your thought process.
For instance, I noticed myself picking up my phone and browsing certain websites (dopamine sources) whenever my thoughts wandered into a topic I find distressing -- instead of confronting those thoughts and thinking them through. For me, Facebook happens not to be addictive, but other sites are (for instance, Quora). I was wasting hours on those sites instead of doing productive things.
Setting up a content blocker to make me think twice before visiting them has helped. So has adding an app that I can set to block using my phone for a given period of time, forcing me to put it down and do other things.
Can you substitute self control with shiny apps like this? I don't mean that there isn't anything that can help avoiding distractions, but (from my own experiences) I have doubts about the effectiveness of soft measures like this. Dismissing a notification about going to sleep or taking a break in the middle of a youtube-binge doesn't require much effort, and investigating what takes all your free time takes significant energy. A commenter mentioned a cron job that shuts down his/her laptop at midnight - this measure can be more effective, because it requires effort to continue what you were doing, not to stop it.
Not to mention the irony of using apps to make you spend less time using apps.
I'm pretty sure this would just subconsciously train me to procrastinate elsewhere. At least when procrastinating on HN there's a chance I'll learn something about programming or business.
I find this idea and noprocrast a tad bizarre. HN has a simple goal (sharing info of interest to hackers), which thanks to focused design it does pretty well. Fixing my brain is feature creep, and should be well outside it's scope.
yea, this is pretty extreme, but 8-10 hours a day is a lot. I did a version of this with facebook and reddit for a while, I noticed I was wasting a lot of time on them so I uninstalled the apps off my phone and blocked the websites with the 1blocker, for facebook it was easy bec they made the desktop site so unusable I tried to use a few times and now basically never go there. reddit was harder but once the api thing happened, that gave me the motivation to just stop scrolling endlessly, I still have it accessible on my pc bec it'll sometimes pop up in search results, but I no longer spend hours scrolling, reading comments and getting in stupid slap fights with strangers.
Not saying you're wrong, just that your ideas don't work for me.
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