How I use the Internet in a healthy way
deprocrastination.co
deprocrastination.co
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.
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!
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.
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.
"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.)"
https://www.wired.com/story/karl-friston-free-energy-princip...
(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.)
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 find Nir Eyal's advice way better.
It's astounding how your thought process changes when you aren't stuck compulsively doom-scrolling through ML-derived feeds of worthless nonsense.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/leechblock-ng...
Is this something genetic, or is it learned?
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.
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.
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).
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.
Visualizing that time is scarce helps me a lot.
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.
Wait what, you mean, like, real people?
In previous generations, you'd just be a crazy cat person or alcoholic or bookworm or spend all your time at the racetrack.
Indeed, the solution is to add other interests and activities to your day, and they'll outcompete the timewasters.
There's a phrase for that: 'Extremely Online': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremely_online
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yup, exactly. Calling businesses the 'main culprit' is absurd, like placing the blame on slaughterhouses for people eating meat.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/companies-carbon-emissions/
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.
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.
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].
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
> I have no interest in a social life
Then got to
> Mostly with my son, sometimes with my partner
Your social life is your partner and son.
Unless you are indifferent to them, I think your assessment of your need of a social life is contradictory.
> For daily tips:
> Follow @deprocrastinate
LOL