Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask YC: How do you avoid wasting too much time online?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 56 posts

Ask YC: How do you avoid wasting too much time online?

#1

Post by bobp »

I spend too much time browsing the web and it's hurting my productivity. There are so many interesting sites online -- hacker news, blogs, friendfeed, facebook, nytimes, etc -- and it's hard for me resist checking them on a daily basis, often multiple times a day. This stuff is really interesting and often useful, especially for an entrepreneurial hacker, and that makes it easy to justify spending so much time to "stay on top of things". However, the opportunity cost of not coding for an hour is huge compared to the benefit of reading yet another "20 things every startup founder should know" article. I need to find a way to break this bad habit. Just being aware of it apparently isn't enough.

I tried 8aweek. It didn't work for me. I've conditioned myself to reflexively press the "10 more minutes" button when the "your break time is up" popup comes up. Plus, at home I use Safari, and 8aweek doesn't work on Safari. (I avoided RescueTime -- the privacy implications are too creepy for me. Maybe I would use it if it had the option for only data collection. Also, I know I have a time wasting problem -- I don't need RescueTime to tell me that.)

The best solution I've found so far is to go somewhere where I don't have an internet connection at all, but it's not always practical.

If you have the same problem, how do you deal with it? I need a working solution.

Re: Ask YC: How do you avoid wasting too much time online?

#2

Post by dangoldin »

I find that creating a schedule for myself helps where I force myself to work on something - even if it is menial things that still need to get done for the site.

I also disable all chat/instant messenger clients since you always lose productivity when switching from one to the other.

The other thing that you can do is try working from a different environment - if you find that you are browsing too much at your desk, try moving somewhere else that you can consider a "work only zone."

As a final step, try disabling your router for a bit and only give yourself access when you achieve your self imposed deadlines.

Re: Ask YC: How do you avoid wasting too much time online?

#3

Post by abstractbill »

I found I'm pretty much unable to do this, so I've done the next-best thing: I concentrate on making justin.tv the site I most like to waste time on.

This has turned out to be quite a useful trick. Each time I find myself wasting time elsewhere, I spend some time thinking about why I'm not wasting time on justin.tv instead, and I get inspired to fix that.

Re: Ask YC: How do you avoid wasting too much time online?

#4

Post by webwright »

FWIW, with RescueTime you can create whitelists of the sites you DO want to track. Every other site will come through as "non-whitelisted site" (the site info never hits our servers). You can set goals like "spend less than 1h surfing news" and have RescueTime SMS you when you break them.

But there's no solution out there that your lack of discipline won't conquer.

One good hack is to set it up so that you either starve or are publicly shamed when you procrastinate. So, you could quit your job (thus putting starvation on the line!). Or you could embed a RescueTime graph on your blog and invite people to hassle you about how you spend your time. ;-)

Re: Ask YC: How do you avoid wasting too much time online?

#5

Post by gabriel »

Stop making yourself feel like you have a duty to spend time on any site. In the end, none of it will give you a meaningful experience.

I loathe apps and sites that make you feel like everything is in your face. Email is like this, so is RSS, same with pretty much all news sites. The list goes on and on.

Re: Ask YC: How do you avoid wasting too much time online?

#10

Post by gruseom »

I'm experimenting with the following: allow myself some web time (say, half an hour), then assign the next period (say, 2 hours) to focused work. So far it seems to work. My main goal is to prevent the two from mixing together - i.e., prevent the web browsing habit from popping up at random intervals and interrupting real work. I think that's the most important thing to tackle first, rather than the absolute totals spent on each.
Post reply on HN