No, as it is my decision to visit the site, or to close the window. It's not HN but myself which hurts my productivity if I can say I have...
Poll: Does the amount of time that you spend on HN hurt your productivity?
31–36 of 36 posts
Re: Poll: Does the amount of time that you spend on HN hurt your productivity?
#32I know I've asked this before, but is there anything I can do to make HN less of a productivity hit? Slow it down in some way perhaps?
Have a widget on the homepage that shows the top 10 links of the day so that we don't have to read and sift through every single submission. Just reading only 10 links per day would be less of a time sucker.
Re: Poll: Does the amount of time that you spend on HN hurt your productivity?
#33I know I've asked this before, but is there anything I can do to make HN less of a productivity hit? Slow it down in some way perhaps?
I don't think so, and I wouldn't want it to.
I don't read it that much at work, but do more so when I am working at home, and sometimes on the train. It is my go-to place to find out what is going on.
Re: Poll: Does the amount of time that you spend on HN hurt your productivity?
#34Actually what hurts my productivity is after spend some time in HN. My mind is cluttered with different ideas from the articles which I have read that is more difficult to focus on the task at hand.
Re: Poll: Does the amount of time that you spend on HN hurt your productivity?
#35I know I've asked this before, but is there anything I can do to make HN less of a productivity hit? Slow it down in some way perhaps?
Have a simple graph on the profile page showing how many minutes the user spent on HN each day in the past week and/or a number on the top panel showing minutes spent on HN over last 24 hours.
I find that just measuring something is a far more powerful way to improve my habits. I am far more likely to set noprocrast=1 if I realize I spent 3 hours on HN yesterday.
Edit: Just realized Zev had posted the same idea a while back.
Re: Poll: Does the amount of time that you spend on HN hurt your productivity?
#36I know I've asked this before, but is there anything I can do to make HN less of a productivity hit? Slow it down in some way perhaps?
What if you emailed a daily digest of the top stories? I visit hn less often when I get the content elsewhere. I found the twitter bots that post links help with this. But twitter is itself a time wasted. Email is easier to control.
Or, what if you reported on the time spent on the site in a give day. Make the font size num_hours*4 em. You make why you measure, right? Show a graph of waste and people might try to make it go down.