121–130 of 216 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What about it?
What "action" does the knowledge from academic research provide to a grad student?
If you are miserable reading academic research papers in your basement everyday for no reason, I would recommend you reconsider.
If you are reading them because you want to cure cancer or get a job, then that's really a different scenario.
For YouTube, I never actually visit YouTube.com. I view my subscriptions via my RSS/Atom feed reader and I watch the videos with mpv. This has probably saved me many hours I would have wasted clicking through "recommended" videos in the sidebar.
I found this on github: https://gist.github.com/jeb5/da22862e469dea21e873acabb562f63...
Was able to get all of my feeds exported to an OPML file, then imported into my RSS Reader of choice.
I still research topics for fun, but I actively have to Google for information and read wiki articles. It feels much more substantive, and I retain the information better.
I found HealthyGamerGG’s recent video really useful for this: https://youtu.be/8PYhEWK2wVA Some scattered notes from this video: - when you're bored, your mind is looking for a particular stimulation - when you allow yourself to resolve boredom with dopaminergic activities like video games, you reinforce for yourself the idea that this is how to relieve yourself of boredom. Your brain in turn will learn to immediatel…
I handle it by collecting quotes that tell me to knock it off. I've since started to focus on just the things I really care about: The purpose of knowledge is action, not knowledge. ― Aristotle Knowledge isn't free. You have to pay attention ― Richard Feynman "Information is not truth" ― Yuval Noah Harari If I were the plaything of every thought, I would be a fool, not a wise man. ― Rumi Dhamma is in your mind, not i…
I'm surprised to not see Pascal's quote in this list: "All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone" ...but maybe that better sums up OP's issue rather than a solution. Either way you'll need to take steps to make it harder to do the things you're currently doing (e.g. get a dumb phone, set up a firewall rule to block these sites, set a timer) but there might be a deeper underly…
1. no news or HN in the morning. I could stop just here. Instead I meditate for 10-20 minutes and write using an app I built for myself (https://enso.sonnet.io). The point is to just process the previous day without editing yourself, hence the very limited UX it has.
2. I also made Sit. (https://sit.sonnet.io), with the goal of: "please share with a friend who needs to sit the fuck down or enjoy the experience yourself." It's just a timer with a more gentle snooze function, nothing special, but also an excuse to tell people to spend more time doing nothing, instead of consuming.
That's 20-30m of my morning. It's not that much I think. I am by no means an organised person and a skip those habits on my worse days. It's just so much better than letting someone put random shit in your head every morning.
3. I try to avoid chatting on HN or Twitter and meet people using my "office ours" (https://sonnet.io/posts/hi) where anyone can just call me to chat, pair program or rant. Feel free to come and say hi!
4. I doodle in bed before falling asleep. The worse my doodles are the better. I put some of them on https://potato.horse
I guess my point is that when I'm not sucked into YT it gets much easier to get stuff done. What helps me is just trying to do some of these things in a slightly shoddy way, so I don't obsess about getting them perfect.
This feels my head with something better than noise which often is just there to dull a sense of anxiety. Hope some of that will be useful.
PS I'm writing an article about a related subject at the moment, so if you wanna check it out, let me know–I'll share it later this week.
I wonder if this can be a good forum for your question. You must suspect every answer here simply because everyone here is a self-selected group of people idly reading and commenting on Hacker News threads. It is like asking your friends at the bar for suggestions on how to quit drinking: many there have no interest in it, and the rest are interested but have not succeeded.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm surprised to not see Pascal's quote in this list: "All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone" ...but maybe that better sums up OP's issue rather than a solution. Either way you'll need to take steps to make it harder to do the things you're currently doing (e.g. get a dumb phone, set up a firewall rule to block these sites, set a timer) but there might be a deeper underly…
One of my favorite pastimes (which allowed me to have a more fruitful relationship with my computer): Living in the Santa Cruz mountains, sauntering in the woods, swimming in a creek, basking in a meadow, biking down into town for coffee and bookstore scouring, and taking the city bus back up. It's just not the same in the Los Angeles greater area.