111–120 of 278 posts
No thanks. Removing internet from my home won't make me more productive, in fact it will make me less productive, as I won't be able to get information instantly, like a recipe for the things that are soon about to go off in my fridge.
I wish there were better ways to regulate your own access. It's easy enough to make good decisions about where you spend your time when you're in a good frame of mind, but it's almost impossible to do that every minute of every day. It's a bit like eating I think. It's not too hard to buy healthy food when you're at the grocery store, but it's hard to say no to a plate of cookies every time you walk past when they're…
I tried living totally without internet access, and while I felt a lot better overall, I eventually had to give in. Nowadays phone books aren't usually delivered to homes anymore, so if you want to get in touch with a store or find a doctor's office, you need internet to search for it. Since I wasn't driving at the time, I couldn't just head out to an internet cafe when it was something important. For similar reasons…
Pay-per-use would is an interesting idea, but if you live with other people it gets a little more complicated.
The best tool I've found is an app called Self Control. It puts rules into your hosts file and either blacklists certain websites or blocks all of them and whitelists the ones you want. It uses an external timeserver so you can't get around it by changing your computer clock, and it runs regular checks to make sure you don't just edit your hosts file yourself. It's really pretty good. And in theory you could set up scripts that would start up certain blocks at a scheduled time every day. The one huge problem though is that it's Mac only.
I don't think there's a way to completely fix the issue externally, but having some powerful tools for limiting yourself would go a long way in making it easier.
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Care to list some?
As a digital nomad for the past several months, Facebook has been crucial in keeping in touch with friends and family back home, but also a perfect platform for staying in contact with new friends I make on my travels :-)
Some people are alcoholics. They can't exist near an open can of beer without their life going to shambles. But most people aren't and don't have the urge to binge drink. I'm not sure how this is any different. The author of this article is an Internetaholic, therefore I should cut my tether to the Internet? And what of my LTE connection?
I see it a lot particularly with regard to facebook. People take "I have a problem" and turn it in to "this thing is a problem".
Sure let's go back to the dark ages because we lack the self control to do things in moderation. No thanks. Removing internet from my home won't make me more productive, in fact it will make me less productive, as I won't be able to get information instantly, like a recipe for the things that are soon about to go off in my fridge.
At what point becomes productivity and efficiency an addiction as well? Don't we already call those people workaholics?
I just discovered the public library which is great for getting work done, but I have to leave my room to get there. Most cafes either don't have wifi or impose a time limit w/ a user/pass login (so changing mac address won't defeat it).
I'm mostly finding it makes me more productive, though it's sometimes frustrating if I need to search for a quick Stack Overflow answer.
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I see it a lot particularly with regard to facebook. People take "I have a problem" and turn it in to "this thing is a problem".
One big difference is that alcohol was not engineered to be addictive. Whereas at Facebook and many other companies there are a lot of smart people continuously trying to improve metrics like DAU, UAM, response frequency, etc. And they do it with no apparent regard for the impact on users' lives. Heck, many game companies proudly advertise how they are the most addictive thing you can get right now.
There's something truly unique about alcohol that isn't true of any other addictive substance on the planet.
I keep my internet off most of the day (via kernel firewall). Have a command that gives me a few minutes of internet so I can look up docs, then shuts everything back down.
Can you say more about how you set it up? This sounds like a balanced solution: you avoid the long time sucks but can still look up needed info.
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An alcohol manufacturer rarely has an army of designers, data scientists and engineers working non-stop to make their product more addictive and measuring their success on engagement growth.
> An alcohol manufacturer rarely has an army of designers, data scientists and engineers working non-stop to make their product more addictive and measuring their success on engagement growth. They have at least the first two, and tobacco companies have, or historically have had, all three. Job titles are slightly different, but basic functions are the same.
I haven't dealt with my laptop based computer addiction, but I have solved my cell phone addiction. It's important to understand how much behavior around technology is based on ingrained habits. My goal with dealing with my phone was to "short-circuit" the habitual/addictive behavior. To do this, I did two things. 1. I turned off all automatic notifications on my phone, as well as all background updates of apps/email…
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11762946
"I think of different communication media as having different urgencies / time constants. Emails are a daily report. My phone's notifications are an hourly report. Notifications which I forward to my watch are the instant things. Be sure to mercilessly "mute" most apps from bugging you on your wrist. With this setup, I never feel the urge to check my phone. If there is something important, it would've buzzed my wrist."