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

news.ycombinator.com

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

#41

Post by axod »

abstractbill wrote: post #3

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.

Hehe completely agree. It's good to waste your time on your own website.

1. Waste time on website

2. Get irritated to death by some bug/lack of feature

3. Go fix bug/feature

4. Goto 1

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

#42

Post by projectileboy »

thingsilearned wrote: post #12

I'm one of the founders of 8aweek. It was created because Zack and I deal with the same problem. The default settings of 8aweek are definitely not strong enough for a major news junky. Mostly because the settings that news junkies need would probably piss of most users :). There are two modes to 8aweek, if you haven't tried already switch your settings to "block mode" and edit your preferences to limit the time and l…

I'll second 8aweek. It has actually changed my browsing habits.

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

#43

Post by Xichekolas »

axod wrote: post #41
abstractbill wrote: post #3

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.

Hehe completely agree. It's good to waste your time on your own website. 1. Waste time on website 2. Get irritated to death by some bug/lack of feature 3. Go fix bug/feature 4. Goto 1

This is the only way I can program. Sadly that makes me a terrible programmer for implementing systems at BigCo, since I usually don't use whatever product they have me working on.

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

#44

Post by misterbwong »

I use 2 computers on a KVM. One for work/projects and the other one for "everything else." The work computer has all alerts and feeds off (including email). I find it gives me a psychological separation. If I really need to work or hit a deadline, the non-work computer goes off.

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

#45

Post by bobp »

menloparkbum wrote: post #31
bobp wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You nailed it. Lately I've been bored by my work. When I'm excited about what I'm working on, the problem is much less serious.

Try to avoid extraneous sites (and email and IM, if possible) until you've gotten something done. I.e. don't start your day off with surfing and email. If you are bored by your work it is too easy to not get started and just continue reading stuff online. The effect of this is that by the time you get around to doing work, your brain is totally scrambled by all the stuff you just piped into it - making it even harder…

Thanks for the tip. I'll definitely try it.

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

#46

Post by trefn »

I use a firefox addon called LeechBlock that lets you list sites that you shouldn't be allowed to go to. I have it redirect me to a to-do list at rememberthemilk.

Sounds like that won't help you too much since you're using Safari, but I urge any firefox users who have this problem to try it out.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4476

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

#47

Post by bobp »

webwright wrote: post #4

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 sta…

Thanks for the heads up about the whitelist feature. I would also like to be able to record all my activity locally and not send anything to the server. It would make RescueTime more useful and eliminate my privacy concerns.

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

#49

Post by unalone »

thingsilearned wrote: post #12

I'm one of the founders of 8aweek. It was created because Zack and I deal with the same problem. The default settings of 8aweek are definitely not strong enough for a major news junky. Mostly because the settings that news junkies need would probably piss of most users :). There are two modes to 8aweek, if you haven't tried already switch your settings to "block mode" and edit your preferences to limit the time and l…

Are there any GTD books you'd recommend? I've heard a lot about GTD and it sounds very interesting, but I've never actually figured out what a good starting point would be.

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

#50

Post by unalone »

gabriel wrote: post #5

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.

I think you actually just nailed the three biggies. The reason is that each of the three works in the same way: it gives you a list of "things to get done," and in two of the three cases that list goes on for a long ways. (Email does too, I suppose, if you really use it extensively.) The only other thing I think fits into this case would be social networking.

It's why I was interested in that new Times application for the Mac, the one that turned RSS reading into a sort of newspaper. When you have that format, then you're expecting to look at something only to have it come to an end. It's a different mindset. At the same time, though, it doesn't solve the problem entirely, problem being: the Internet moves constantly, not only at set intervals.

I wonder: is there a way of limiting that without alienating people? Of setting a precise limit to how much can be done during any given time, then ending things up? It would make it a lot easier to avoid sites. At the same time, though, it would slow things down to a crawl compared to the speed at which things move now.

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