Some nice pointers, well done to the author for keeping up with it.
I would love to see similar tips adapted for parents of small children. Ones that start with “I wake up at 6 am by my toddler who just woke up, is already going 100% and wants to play Snow White”. Or “I break my fast at 11 am because I didn’t have time to eat before, and then I forgot”.
I find myself using the phone to just switch off my mind from the usual overdrive of looking after kids, it’s probably not healthy but a tired mind craves something outside of toys and child dramas.
Exactly! I found that a strict schedule goes out the window pretty quick with small children. What I try to do is have a few "anchor points" throughout the day - 11am is always lunch, 1 pm is nap time, 7:30 is bedtime. The rest of the day is pretty flexible.
In order to get work done, I try to package my workflow so the feedback loop is as tight as possible. For coding, that means small tasks, good test loop, easy to deploy. I try to do at least a little each day, even 15 minutes, just to prevent myself from forgetting how everything works.
It may not seem optimized, but I know the kids are quickly getting older and I'll both have more free time later and also miss spending lots of time with them when they were small!
I’m currently struggling with this, I have a three year old, and a wife who work in retail. On the positive side, also every afternoon is set aside for my kid. The downside is that project of any kind is more or less relegated to a few hours in the evening or the few weekends with no other plans.
As children get older they love helping with project around the house, but still, finding time is hard.
My biggest success is keeping a list of small tasks, stuff which can be done in less than 15 minutes. You can actually churn through quite a few of those during an afternoon.
I think I improved my internet usage habits when I started categorizing my usage into either "content" or "comfort" and examining when and why I was using either, with an eye to reducing the reasons I was subconsciously seeking out comfort material. That's helped me both reduce stress behaviors in my life and maximize the fraction of time I spend exposing myself to things that are actually worth remembering.
Small things, like listening to an audiobook while you do laundry instead of the same three albums you listen to every day, can have a marked effect on your sense of personal growth.
The "no email before 11am" mirrors my approach, which is no email before noon, which in turn was inspired by Karl Friston, who I met a couple of times during a neuroscience masters at UCL:
"His greeting to the group is liable to be his first substantial utterance of the day, as Friston prefers not to speak with other human beings before noon. (At home, he will have conversed with his wife and three sons via an agreed-upon series of smiles and grunts.)"
(I should add for balance that a couple of colleagues that I know said he was a nightmare to work with in terms of getting things done on time though!)
The one this I disagree with in the article is the alarm clock. Much better to go to bed at a time where you'll wake up naturally roughly around the time you want to. (Presuming you're not the kind of person who'd naturally sleep for as long as you're left alone, in which perhaps there may be other things - caffeine intake, too much alcohol, eating badly etc. - that it might be worth focussing on first.)
Good for the author that they found what works for them.
I wouldn't call the article "How to use the Internet in a healthy way", though. There's no discussion on what constitutes healthy and what does not, how to tell reading from procrastination, or exploring a new topic from doomscrolling.
Knowing what the author does is pointless when we don't know anything about them. If someone says they're a programmer with ADHD, we probably face similar challenges, so they'll have my interest. If someone is a parent of 5 with their own business, I respect the hell out of them, but I won't be able to relate.
I'm a huge fan of LeechBlock [1] and use it on every general-purpose computer that I own. I commit various blocklists to a public GitHub repo and configure each instance to download the lists at startup. I have a hard block list for useless/previously-overfrequented sites and a soft block that is configured to block after a specified period; the soft block is also configured as a hard block on my work laptop.
It's astounding how your thought process changes when you aren't stuck compulsively doom-scrolling through ML-derived feeds of worthless nonsense.
I wonder how the author manages to get so much discipline and focus in the early morning without even having eaten. I notice that right after I eat I am way more focused and energetic, I think more clearly.
I’m the opposite; while fasting (overnight/naturally, nothing outlandish), I have focus and any carb-heavy, time-heavy, or mass-heavy eating will destroy that.
When left alone (typically if the family is traveling on a school break where I can’t), I will sometimes forget to eat entirely for a day if engrossed in a hobby, especially one that involves programming.
I start with the default premise that such differences aren’t genetic, but rather environmental. In my case, I’m overweight as one contributing difference. I’ve noticed that people I’ve dated who were thinner have a much harder time going long periods (such as might happen when we were traveling together). I don’t recommend becoming overweight, of course, but it likely has a thin silver lining here, especially when combined with a ketogenic (even temporarily) diet.
It’s trained. Once the body is adapted to burning fat instead of carbs while fasted many people find focusing to be much easier since they’re running on a much more consistent fuel rather than a roller coaster of blood sugar spikes. Think of a slow burning furnace rather than a warehouse full of tinder. Atm you feel better after eating because your body is dependant on that hit. Research time-restricted eating, or as it’s called by most people, intermittent fasting.
I used to really look forward to breakfast, the thought distracted me.
Then I got a medication I need to take first thing in the morning, and 30-60 minutes before my first meal. Since I kinda like being alive, I learned.
I think it boils down to motivation: if you do this for yourself to find out if it's better for you, or if you already know it's better for you, it will work. If you do this just because some guy on the internet said it works for them, don't bother.
I don't know how much of this is nature vs nurture but I think this is particular to the individual. I personally focus pretty well without needing breakfast but my partner is the opposite.
I am happy it works for them. Otherwise, it is bragging and an elaborate way of "just don't procrastinate".
Planning to have one (or another) schedule is one thing, the easy one. Consistent execution is hard for some and impossible for others.
The difficulty comes from many reasons: health, the need of working with people from the different time zone, other less predictive commitments (e.g. parenting), neurodiversity (for many people with ADHD boosting dopamine is a necessity; no distraction does not equate to productivity; it equates no energy to do anything).
...interesting approach, but how would you do it with the beautiful chaos kids and family bring into any plan? Would really like to hear from people who did this...
At one point the mobile phone turns into a Skinner Box?
It is my claim that the amount of hours vested on Internet
consumption is directly proportional to the inability
to interpret in person body language, verbal cues and in person room reading...among other things.
i recommend meditation. it makes it easier to focus on tasks one at a time. and not get distracted by the internet. your mind is a muscle and it also requires training to function properly. YMMV.
I've said this a bunch of times before on articles like this, which are fairly commonly posted on HN, likely because the people who populate HN are very online and work on computers all day:
If you think you are spending too much time online, or you think you are wasting your time online, a solution is, for lack of a better way of saying it, to get a life. (I don't mean that in the "get a life, nerd" way)
Get things you want to do, hopefully with other people, hopefully ever so often in person. Once you actually have goals and ambitions, social relationships to maintain, you will see your use of the internet changing quite a bit.
Personally, I think some people get far too attached to the idea that the internet is a place to hangout or a place to just be. In some cases that can be true, but it pales in comparison to hanging out in person and doing things. The internet is a tool, and once you have things to do with it, especially with people you know and meet in person or in service of a project, you begin to change how you use it pretty much right away.
For me this is a matter of timeblocking my personal life too. If I don't have anything else, I basically procrastinate by browsing the Internet (Reddit! HN! All shiny new stuff!) So every quarter I have my objectives (I shudder to write the OKR word) and then time block my personal calendar. I have calculated I have around 20 hours per week of "me" time (besides work, sleep, home stuff, and so on). Do I want to get healthy? Bam! There goes 3 hours per week! Do I want to learn to play the piano? Bam! That would be 4 hours sir. Meditate? 2 hours per week. Read fiction books? Bam! 4 hours and you're done.
Timeblocking can help. I think it also helps to make and sustain friends, which is a kind of "work" in its own right as you mature into adulthood. You begin to learn that lifelong relationships take effort and almost always meeting each other in person. For all but the very few, loneliness is very detrimental to your health and sense of well-being, and I don't think being online is a "cure" or even a very good facsimile.
Some people get far to into the idea that "being online" is their hobby, that the relationships they make online are as important as the relationships they make offline. And I would gently disagree in almost every case. The relationships we make online are often ephemeral, anonymous, and superficial. They have their time and place, but they don't replace relationships with real people you can see and interact with in person. They are not nearly as fulfilling. For people that game a lot, for instance, games often have online communities, but I've always found that online communities pale in comparison to in-person events or LANs. All attempts to recreate them online are but shadows of the real thing.
Once you start to see being online as just a minor attachment to your offline life, then being online simply stops having as much importance in your life.
For me, the experience of "getting a life" has been sort of like being duped by crappy infomercial products. I get excited by the prospect of the thing, but it turns out that it simply does not work as advertised. The manual is poorly translated from an original that was poorly written to begin with, and the customer support reps seemingly can't do anything except search a knowledge base that doesn't mention the problems I'm having. I can technically make it "work" with a considerable amount of effort, but the results are always underwhelming, it never gets any easier, and I get nowhere near a point where I feel like this thing is worth the hassle before I decide to just shelve it.
Smartphones pretty much enable being Extremely Online. Sitting in a chair to do your computing has largely been phased out, except for busy offices. However, I will add: Desktop PCs and accompanying chairs sort of force you to create things. Smartphones (for me) have always been about consumption, not creation.
Do desktops really force one to do that. Many gaming addicts are on PC, not console or mobile. Desktops also accord more screen real estate for consumption.
> Smartphones (for me) have always been about consumption, not creation.
One of the top uses of smartphones is creating and sharing photos and videos. They're also very capable tools for a variety of creative tasks that aren't focused on making files on a computer.
Yeah I've got stuff I want to do. I can't. No money, no time, no people and even when I had all that, I fucked it all up and shat it down the toilet. So I spend time shitposting and reading other people's shit. It's easy, fast, and takes my mind off the miserable game called life.
For many, the solution is to get a life. For me, it's to get rid of mine. If someone could do it for me, that'd be great.
I'm seeing distortions here. If you've got time to "live" on the internet, you've got time for friends, and you can make them. No reason you can't have this again.
Well, I did try, half-arsedly as always. Joined a few Discord groups, no one talks (had fun a few times when people were in voice chat tbf), servers just die.
Volunteered for community cleaning, fixing computers and bikes. The former was really nice, but no friends. The latter, they did their best to make it clear I wasn't wanted there. I mean, I wish they'd just say it to my face "look, we don't like you".
Every time I went drinking with coworkers, same thing. This reminds me a lot of my early years, where I would break my back (once literally) to help people, give them money, anything. They're friends, right? Turned out I'm no friend to them.
Now, the thing is, unlike online, I'm not an asshole offline. I am very quiet and really reserved. You'll never get a disagreement or any emotional opinion for that matter out of me and you certainly won't hear my real thoughts on anything. But I do want to and enjoy helping people, and I wish others were the same.
I guess that's a big problem to other people. There's no place for me here, damn. Just wish I wasn't such a coward and just went through with it.
That actually doesn't sound half-assed. Just unfortunate. It sounds banal, but by the numbers, given enough time putting yourself out there trying different things you'll accrue more connections with people who aren't complete assholes. There are many like you who just want to meet nice people.
Whenever I read something like this it always comes across as insufferably pompous and actually quite a limiting and sad life. I would much rather just handle a mix of different things and have some variety to my day and life than this super buttoned down approach.
I’m glad it works for the author but when I’m making a cup of tea I think I’ll keep scrolling Instagram thanks.
I fully expect to downvoted into oblivion for this comment.
Perhaps you're not someone who needs this kind of advice. If you don't struggle with procrastication or distraction, then it seems pointlessly rigid because it's intended to solve a problem you don't have. But not everyone is like you.
Many people are easily distracted and prone to procrastination. They can't easily switch from one task to the next, and they struggle to stay focused. I'm like that: it's why I'm commenting on Hacker News instead of writing the article I've been paid to. It's enormously frustrating to have goals and obligations you fail to achieve because your brain refuses to cooperate. A rigid framework that forces people like that to marshal their time and attention more effectively can be a big help.
The thing is, even if one IS susceptible to distraction and procrastination, the OP's solution may not and probably does not apply.
It's nice that the OP has a life where they are only answerable to themselves and where they can carve out time as they see fit and the only challenge is their own self-control. Noticeably absent from the article is the mention of any spouse or kids.
So what we're talking about with the OP is a single, self-employed, well-to-do knowledge worker who has found a way to exercise self-control. That's fine, more power to them, and it's great that this advice may apply to one segment of the long tail demographics of the internet, but the range of people for whom the OP advice "doesn't apply" is huge and includes far more than just people who struggle with procrastination and distraction.
You're right, it doesn't have to apply to everyone, but some acknowledgement by the OP that his story is but one sliver of experience would be a good idea. After all, he's selling a book and an app/extension.
We’re all trying, mate. Sometimes one of us writes down their experience to see if it can help anyone else. I am not sure if there is any advice that is truly “for everyone”.
It either works for you or it doesn’t. If it does - great. If it doesn’t - I hope you find something that does.
The only way we’ll know is if we share our experiences. I don’t see any value in critique here.
Sure. It’s also a good way to filter out advice that’s less applicable to a larger audience. Perhaps it’s aspirational advice of sorts for those who can attain the material conditions of the one bestowing it.
> Perhaps you're not someone who needs this kind of advice.
He has the first/top comment on the article. Seems to me he's binging HN, hitting that refresh button. Check his IP, he probably visits several times daily.
In my defence I wasn’t the first comment - but I was waiting for a series cloudformation templates to apply so had a few spare minutes - hence I picked up my phone and left a comment - I’ve bit come back since so I’m surprised to see this comment has kicked of a lot of chat
>Whenever I read something like this it always comes across as insufferably pompous and actually quite a limiting and sad life
Others have commented on how it is pompous (I agree) but I'd like to talk about the "limiting and sad life" bit.
I used to browse the net constantly in any room of spare time, I'd do it while waiting for anything, while relaxing at home, commuting, in my lunch break, you name it, while doing other mindless, yet active tasks such as cleaning or walking I'd listen to music.
Some two months ago I just decided to stop. I realized that all those things weren't really adding much to my life at all, I might try to stay up to date about this or that event, and I definitely still listen to music, but I do so with intent. I intentionally do certain things with a certain objective in mind instead of allowing myself to waste time out of habit.
In doing so, I'm more focused when it comes to achieving those objectives, I don't scroll through news because that's what was at the top of Reddit. I check news sources because I want to learn about the state of something. I don't grab a random album and press play, I think about what I want to listen. I also feel I'm way more aware of what my life is because my mind has way more spare time. I get bored sometimes, yes, and being bored brings very interesting thoughts that I've really come to appreciate.
I feel that a constant usage of internet is actually limiting and creates a sad life while the opposite is liberating and brings a feeling of fulfillment.
That's because it is incredibly pompous, condescending and little more than anonymous "blog posts" that serve as a preview/advertisement for a product they are peddling.
"What if we told you that there is a game: (...)"
"Let’s call this the ultimate game: your real life."
Thanks for this golden nugget of knowledge, buddy.
There shouldn't be a lot of downvoting for merely stating your own preferences and what impression the article left for you personally. The thing that is sort of annoying and that I have the impression lately increases in frequency on HN, is, when people put wrappers around their comments, especially the kind of wrappers pre-addressing potential downvotes. It does not really add anything, except for "I think HN community will be bad.". Haters gonna hate anyway, I guess, so no need to add such wrappers.
I have experienced downvoting like that before, but usually it is about properly reading what the comment actually says and some do not do that. Some go ahead and start interpreting things into it. However, do you really think you wrapping the comment with that pre-addressing is going to help it? I doubt it.
I don’t get much pompous extract from the author (in contrast to many other “here’s how I structure my days to maximize my inherent awesomeness” articles; the Stephen Wolfram ones come to mind here).
In my own life, I have one (niche hobby) site I probably spend too much time on and watch a lot of YouTube when I’m bored (almost exclusively on the TV so displacing sports/other TV). I’ve noticed that if I let mindless consumption drift into too many areas, it takes over like weeds, but just a little bit of consciousness helps me keep/regain the balance I want in my life.
I see the structure as the author keeping the balance they want and sharing some details about it.
I stop reading articles like the parent when it goes into "spending time with other people". That's not me. I have no interest in a social life, and when a social life intrudes on me, I usually have to work hard to de-socialize my life.
I could write a similar article about "How to use a social life in a healthy way", which for me would be to minimize it.
My life might be "limiting", but that's when I'm having the best time: I work and work out (a lot) and adventure on weekends and that's about it.. Mostly with my son, sometimes with my partner, frequently alone, and almost never with other people. When I do it with other people, I never have the deep dive experience that I want in those endeavors. They detract from it, for me.
For other people, it's the exact opposite. My partner doesn't like to do any of those things alone, and often seeks out others for them.
Different strokes for different folks, but my buttoned down, limited life is exactly what makes me happy. That said, I don't push it on others, but I do like reading material about living the solitary life, or the goodness of being alone, or quiet.
Please don't end your comments that way. I had already upvoted your comment halfway through but then on personal principle had to flip it to a downvote.
Your account isn't able to downvote, so that's probably why you don't see them. The feature is unlocked when the account gets over 500 karma. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17731487
Everything is okay in moderation, it's just that moderating yourself requires some discipline and some of the uses of the internet are actively trying to get you addicted. One "solution" is thus to just never interact with certain stuff, although I agree you then miss out on some of the good parts of the internet.
> some of the uses of the internet are actively trying to get you addicted
No offence intended, but I find this trope really exhausting. Web products - like any other product in the world - are designed to be enjoyable, and a side effect of that is that you will want to use them more. That's not what addiction is. I don't wake up in cold sweats needing to scroll through Instagram.
My tolerance doesn't increase, I don't experience withdrawal, I wouldn't suffer if you removed it from me. It's a horrendous mutilation of the meaning of the word, using it to mean 'an enjoyable habit'. I've been addicted to heroin, and I could talk at you for days about the difference.
This, along with other popular tropes like the 'corporations are responsible for 95% of carbon emissions' one, seem to be designed to excuse the individual from straightforward behavioural issues, like not being able to control their procrastination. I'm not complaining because I feel corporations are attacked, but because this isn't a healthy way to face (or rather not face) your problems.
> 'corporations are responsible for 95% of carbon emissions'
Well, is that factoid wrong though? Sometimes personal responsibility is just a smokescreen pushed by bigger fish to guilt the smaller ones, red herrings. Same situation as the California water shortage where personal use is massively dwarfed by agricultural use of water.
I'm not making a recondite point here. I think maybe you're thinking I'm saying something more complex than I am. My point is that companies exist because they provide goods and services which people want to buy.
The S&P 100 aren’t sitting around a carbon campfire, passing a massive carbon joint, while they chat about how much they enjoy destroying the environment.
Your entire point is that the narrative that industrial-scale carbon producers are chiefly responsible for carbon production is itself faulty, because it obviates personal responsibility. Because those businesses are doing it behest of consumers. Is that right?
It seems like a false dichotomy, because one can affirm personal responsibility and place the blame on the main culprits of an activity. And to claim that businesses are forced into do that because of consumers- well when do individual consumers get a chance to express their feelings at how carbon is produced by the businesses they patronize? How transparent is the production process to consumers? There is information asymmetry at play.
Reducing such a complex issue into a simple moral judgment about personal responsibility (or the dodging thereof) would seem to be an oversimplification.
> Your entire point is that the narrative that industrial-scale carbon producers are chiefly responsible for carbon production is itself faulty, because it obviates personal responsibility. Because those businesses are doing it behest of consumers.
Yup, exactly. Calling businesses the 'main culprit' is absurd, like placing the blame on slaughterhouses for people eating meat.
There’s definitely a place for personal responsibility in terms of land or air travel, but it’s hard to blame individual consumers for things like America’s car culture, the product of decades of urban planning and lack of support for public transit.
Well, this is not much different from other emergent phenomena like election results. The outcome of the 2020 election was not under any one person's control, but that's a shoddy argument for claiming it's outside of everyone's control in aggregate. (I mean, it's certainly not in any company's control either.)
The answer is that we need to coordinate, get serious, and fix these problems. But part of getting serious is not using obvious sophistry to trick dull-witted people into thinking that 'corporations' are just magically burning carbon for reasons that have nothing at all to do with their consumption, and therefore there's no point in their changing their own behaviour –– which is a very prevalent argument on social media, and is what I was alluding to initially.
I think there's a stronger argument for personal responsibility with carbon emissions than for voting. If you buy one new car, that increases the demand for cars by 1, which increases the demand for steel by about 1 tonne, which increases the production of steel by almost exactly 1 tonne. (It also increases the price of steel slightly, but probably not enough to decrease the demand for steel by even 1 kg.) Producing a tonne of steel emits 1.85 tonnes of CO₂, so in a year or two, there will be 1.85 tonnes of CO₂ more in the atmosphere than if you hadn't bought that car.
By contrast, the result of any one person's vote in the 02020 election was nil. I don't think there's any person in the world whose vote in 02020, if you'd changed it to some other candidate, would have resulted in a different candidate winning. Whether this is valid consequentialist moral reasoning or not is related to, for example, whether participants in a firing squad are killers.
On the other hand, if you live in Los Angeles, your life is going to suck pretty hard without a car; you won't be able to go to college and you probably won't have a job. Good luck convincing anyone in LA to follow your example after that! Unilaterally opting out of car culture mostly hurts you, though it also has a first-order effect of helping the planet a little bit, in a way that giving your vote to a marginal candidate doesn't. Substantially reducing your carbon footprint requires not self-sacrifice but some kind of collective action, like the massive installation of solar panels across California over the past few years, which in turn was made profitable by the mostly Chinese research and development that has dropped the resources required for solar panels by over an order of magnitude over the last decade.
Or, for example, like the collective action in which NCL (owned by Firestone, General Motors, Standard Oil, and Mack Trucks) bought up the nearly-bankrupt Los Angeles public transportation system in 01944, an act for which they were convicted of antitrust violations in 01949, and converted it from electric to internal combustion engines over the following 19 years, completing the job in 01963.
Corporations are organs of collective action—"coordination", as you put it—so they can sometimes achieve things that individual efforts cannot; because all the people in a corporation can act together (for example, under the command of management) to do something that would be counterproductive if only a few of them were doing it.
Also, though, there are better uses of computers than congratulating yourself on seeing through "obvious sophistry" and not being so "dull-witted" as to think [insert obvious strawman argument].
What's the crux of your point here? I think you're imputing some wider meaning to what was actually a very simple point (i.e. saying that N people have no power, just because 1/N people can't individually make a difference, is like saying the electorate has no power over an election result because one of them can't change the outcome).
My wider point is precisely that people have personal responsibility for carbon emissions, in exactly the way you described. In the car example you gave, the "corporations are responsible for most of climate change!" argument would attribute the emissions involved in manufacturing your car to the corporation instead of you. It's a compelling argument until you think about it, in concrete terms like that, for even thirty seconds.
> My wider point is precisely that people have personal responsibility for carbon emissions, in exactly the way you described.
I agree with that as far as it goes—certainly attributing the emissions to the car buyer is less foolish than attributing them to General Motors, US Steel, or Peabody Coal—but I think it's still an oversimplification, and that personal action isn't enough. And I would like you to stop using HN to congratulate yourself on how smart you are.
to me, general internet browsing without an intent is like eating a bag of doritos. It's fine from time to time but don't down a "family size" bag all in one sitting, it's just not good for you.
I would love to see similar tips adapted for parents of small children. Ones that start with “I wake up at 6 am by my toddler who just woke up, is already going 100% and wants to play Snow White”. Or “I break my fast at 11 am because I didn’t have time to eat before, and then I forgot”.
I find myself using the phone to just switch off my mind from the usual overdrive of looking after kids, it’s probably not healthy but a tired mind craves something outside of toys and child dramas.