41–50 of 50 posts
How to Work Deeply ?
How to decide on your depth philosophy ?
Ritualize your deep work
Make Grand Gestures
Embrace Boredom
Drain the shallows
Quantifying the depth of the work you do.
forced breaks are good for getting exercise throughout the day.
when you sit back down you can CHOOSE to go back to time wasting, or not.
I have the same problem solved for kid with coin dispenser and coin acceptor. Coin acceptor is connected right to OpenWrt router via USB. Once you put a quarter, it turns on Internet for 30 more minutes. Dispenser is connected to PC with the app where he has to solve (not very hard) math puzzles. When you reach the score of 10, the coin is getting dispensed. Internet usage is down 2-3 times now, compared to what it w…
Wow, that's a great idea, and it turns the Internet into a reward ("how can I use this limited resource effectively") as opposed to nonstop mindless scrolling. Is the router off for everyone when disabled or is it like an IP based block using the router's API to add and remove blocks on demand?
We live in a pretty strange world, strange in a new way: we can interact with anyone in the world and we can learn anything we want with minimal effort. We can also endlessly be entertained passively if we choose to do that.
You don't really think about it much, but before smart phones we had to set time aside and go sit at a desktop machine to use the internet, so you had to actually have something to do, or time to kill. Before the internet, we used to loaf around reading books, sipping on tea, flipping through television channels, and before television we used to have a ton of downtime. We didn't stress over the downtime that much because it was just a fact of life.
Now that we can be productive in some way all the time due to the internet, we tend to think of the time we spend doing nothing as a waste, a new phenomenon brought on by phones, but it isn't really true. Human beings have always spent about half their waking hours loafing about. The ones that loved learning read book after book. It's never been easier to read book after book than it is now.
So are you actually wasting time? What are you reading? Reddit has a very bad signal to noise ratio, especially as of late, but there's valuable stuff there. HN is quite a bit better, but still a lot of it will be uninteresting to some and interesting to others.
I spend a lot of time reading on my phone. Books, articles, conversations on this site, and I've improved my vocabulary and command of the English language immensely, I've learned quite a bit on a wide set of topics, I can read Cyrillic and Greek phonetically and I can walk you through the particles in the standard model and what their properties are, I know a bit about information theory, and a bunch more. I couldn't dream of doing all this learning 30 years ago with just a public library available, it would've cost me hundreds of thousands of dollars and taken me insane amounts of time to source the material. I'd be sitting around watching TV drinking miller lite believing things like "if you ask a cop if he's a cop he has to tell you" because I'd have had no way to easily check if what someone told me was true.
It's likely you'd have wasted more time if smartphones didn't exist. This idea that every waking moment needs to be productive is incorrect. Before smartphone you'd probably spend most of your free time watching TV and drinking beer.
So if what you do on your downtime is rewarding, it's not a waste. And if you're like me and you soak up information like a sponge and love learning, these devices are a blessing. Just decide not to spend downtime doing things that aren't rewarding to you, downtime is not the problem, being unhappy with how you spend it is. Learning interesting things is certainly not a waste of time, and neither is watching egirls on twitch if that's what you enjoy, because you'd have been watching married with children reruns otherwise.
1. demand more. If a headline can't prove to you that it is relevant, it isn't. This essentially cuts out all click-baits, but that is just the start of it. If Twitter and/or Facebook doesn't _consistently_ provide value to you, they are out. I have a couple of people who insist on organizing things on Facebook, but I just check my notifications (on the site), I don't look at the feed because it does not provide enough value.
Reddit is my big issue. I spent way too much time on r/news, r/ukraine etc so I have decided just not to visit reddit until september, then I will have to reevaluate it.
2. Intentionallity. Many sites can be very valuable or a complete waste of time. I have spent a lot of time on YouTube, but I have also gotten a lot of value out of it. I have also watched a lot of videos that were not very valuable.
I definitely still struggle with intentionallity, but the idea is that you spend your time on something you want, not what diverse algorithms want you spend the time on.
In general: your eyeballs are very important and I think it is fair that you demand a high price for your attention. That doesn't mean that you have to be productive at all times, being paid in fun is fine, being paid in aweinspiringness or whatever else you value is fine too.
But demand a high price for your attention.
The key is to note on how you feel afterwards: if you feel queizy and slightly-to full on regretfull, then you should change going forward. If you feel happy then, fine, you just spent a lot of time on something you enjoyed - there is no problem with that.
Log out. Reddit/HN are less appealing when you can't interact with someone, especially if you feel they're wrong and correct info needs to be supplied. If you really want to stop doing something, don't place yourself in a situation where it's easy to do so.
I can only keep away by "internally" rating the whole platform as trash.