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Comment by jjs | Hacker News Reader

The most dangerous traps now are new behaviors that bypass our alarms about self-indulgence by mimicking more virtuous types.

I quit playing all Facebook games when I realized why they are so bad for me: so many of them are glorified work simulators (virtual farms, restaurants, crime empires, etc.) that falsely satisfy that part of the brain that wants to get some work done!

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Maybe our most effective strategy is pre-emptive avoidance? I've never played any of those Facebook games, in fact I never joined a social networking site at all for years, because I KNEW it would be a time sink. I like computer games but i've sworn never to even TRY World of Warcraft. I felt pretty stupid about trying EVE Online (I was intrigued by the business aspects) but turns out it's very boring anyway.

So my point is, recognize in advance the time-wasting potential of prospective activities, and that will save you some grief. Another strategy: treat these activities like tradable items, like currently I'm considering "Buy: iPad, Sell: Xbox 360" and then the net effect of a new gizmo should be nullified.

I still remember how much time I spent playing the first generation of RPG, like Bard's Tales and Ultima 1/2/3. After a couple of these episodes, I tended to avoid these kinds of games because of the huge time commitment. It felt like a pain to start learning and playing huge time-sink games. I have been cured since then.

Perhaps then the solution is to make the work more like these games. Which makes a lot of it a UX challenge.

Now that is a brilliant idea! A friend once had a project proposal to do that for team management (transferring football manager simulators to real life, essentially) but it never got funded.

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