Hacker News Reader

Comment by econner | Hacker News Reader

Regarding #3 do you have designated times that you read, etc? I find that I end up spending a lot of little chunks on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and HN when something is compiling or deploying or starting to run. I keep saying I'm going to stop checking all of these inane things, but I always fall back into it with these 5 min chunks where it would be hard to do something else.

View on HN

HN has a fantastic no-procrastination mode(enabled in settings), it locks you out after 20 minutes of browsing, for the next 3 hours, it really helps. Since I don't feel like fb/twitter are adding anything to my life, I just blocked them in my router. I still end up there occassionally, but it's not an addiction. I still do spend too much time on reddit, but I'm trying avoid it as well. I'm getting better at it, but slowly. It's mostly a matter of my brain gradually comprehending that it's a pretty joyless activity that adds very little to my life.

I don't have a designated time for reading, I'm just trying to avoid the "bad" kinds of information, and since my brain keeps craving it, audiobooks end up being the best way to satisfy it.

Thanks these are great ideas.

I've found that logging off of Twitter and Facebook make a difference for me. My password is in a password manager so that adds yet another step. Anything to break the "muscle memory" and habit of reaching for a procrastination fix.

Yea, good ideas definitely. I try this but I end up reading the twitter home page, lol. Maybe I will try blocking them using /etc/hosts

Reply on news.ycombinator.com