You're in a good company, Paul Graham himself wrote about this problem several times.
Do you read HackerNews all day and never actually do anything?
101–110 of 149 posts
Re: Do you read HackerNews all day and never actually do anything?
#102I have a huge problem with this. My problem is getting started. Sometimes I'm so overwhelmed by what I have to do that I either don't want to start or I don't know where to start. However, when I begin, I can code/study for hours on end. Maybe some of you are in the same boat.
Here are some tools I'm using to keep myself focused. Concentrate (http://getconcentrating.com/) blocks websites that distract me, opens/closes apps, blocks distracting apps (RSS reader, Twitter), and reminds me every ten minutes of my goals via Growl. I'm also using it with Vitamin-R (http://www.publicspace.net/Vitamin-R/index.html) to help me work in pomodoro cycles. Hope you get some use out of those apps! :-)
Re: Do you read HackerNews all day and never actually do anything?
#103The best thing I've found for distractions is a program called "Concentrate" on OS X. You can set time to block certain classifications of sites, such as social networks. I do the pomodoro technique which is 25 minutes code, 5 minute break alternations. You'd be surprised that you get just about the same amount of HN time in your 5 minute allotments. I did a blog post about it here: http://jasonseifer.com/2010/02/08/…
I just wrote a comment to this submission before reading yours. :-) I totally agree. Concentrate is a lifesaver.
Re: Do you read HackerNews all day and never actually do anything?
#104There was a story recently on HN about a guy who splits his work hours into 30 minutes of work and 30 minutes of distraction. It turned out to work quite well for him. I guess I'm almost doing the same, spending most of my "distraction" time on HN. There's a good trick however if you want to stop doing that: work with someone else, with each one being able to look at the other's monitor. Even better: do that with peo…
"work with someone else, with each one being able to look at the other's monitor."
This trick works even when the other person is remote: for the last 6 weeks, I have spent about 25 or 30 hours a week using VNC to watch someone 11 time zones away while he in turn watches me. While we watch each other, we spend almost no time procrastinating.
We both work from home, do not have TV sets in our homes, and do almost all of our procrastination on the internet.
Both of us would like to increase the number of people using this trick, so if you are interested in trying this way of using VNC to reduce procrastination, write to vladimir.slepnev@gmail.com.
Re: Do you read HackerNews all day and never actually do anything?
#105I've never been at the stage where I don't do _anything_, but I'm often frustrated that I don't do _enough_. I went through a stage of spending way too much time on Reddit - on the order of 4-5 hours a day. This has been discussed often, but it can be crippling - as soon as you hit the tiniest mental roadblock, you switch your browser to Reddit, next thing you know it's 20 minutes later and not only is your roadblock…
very good chrome equivalent: StayFocusd https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/laankejkbhbdhmip...
Thanks for this, I was persuaded by parent's argument, but am a Chrome user.
Re: Do you read HackerNews all day and never actually do anything?
#106Suppose you're working on debugging java threads. You can open browser tabs like these, instead. Works for me.
http://www.delicious.com/tag/java+concurrency?setcount=100
http://www.reddit.com/search?q=java+concurrency
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com#s...
Re: Do you read HackerNews all day and never actually do anything?
#107The /etc/hosts hack actually works. I don't use noprocrast since I need to visit news.yc for other good reasons during my work. But the trick that really made the difference is this. I run a cron job which will over write the /etc/hosts with a file which has yc/reddit blocked. This way, when ever I open access for good reasons or even to have my 30 minutes per day of YC reading, the file gets overwritten in the next…
I use the /etc/hosts block, but defeat myself if I edit it... would you be willing to share the cron job? Much oblidged!
If I understood correctly it should be as simple as having an extra file setup to replace your hosts file say /etc/hosts.override and put all your blocked hosts there along with your regular hosts file.
Then you just add a 30 minute cron job to do
cp /etc/hosts.override /etc/hostsRe: Do you read HackerNews all day and never actually do anything?
#108Re: Do you read HackerNews all day and never actually do anything?
#109Re: Do you read HackerNews all day and never actually do anything?
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
Like a Ship-It award? ;)
What's the allusion here?