Don't Worry About Your Productivity, Worry About You
nathanael.hevenet.com
Don't Worry About Your Productivity, Worry About You
1–10 of 17 posts
Re: Don't Worry About Your Productivity, Worry About You
#2I have also been trying to slow down and it has had a profound effect on my overal performance and happiness. I think cutting out youtube and hacker news is a bit much though.
Re: Don't Worry About Your Productivity, Worry About You
#3I have also been trying to slow down and it has had a profound effect on my overal performance and happiness. I think cutting out youtube and hacker news is a bit much though.
Cutting them out completely might be a little much. Limiting them is a great idea to be productive is a good idea though.
Re: Don't Worry About Your Productivity, Worry About You
#4These things you speak of are tools, and yes in excess they can hinder more than help.
There's something to be said about staying connected, and giving your mind mental breaks now and again.
The key is moderation.
Re: Don't Worry About Your Productivity, Worry About You
#5For good or bad, I can't express how much of changed person I'm due to Hacker News. It has taught me to question dogma wherever I can, that has given me a better understanding of how the world works, in other words, getting the birds eye view seat of the world.
So, at my current standing, procrastination is good.
Or quite simply, as they say "too much of everything is bad" applies to procrastination and everything in general.
Re: Don't Worry About Your Productivity, Worry About You
#6How to make productive use of your time: get something out of what you read other than enjoyment.
For example, I begun keeping a summary on substantive link so that I build up a list of citations and information that I can use to write essays. I want to make it a habit that I will do this once a day, but it's not the time for adding yet another habit to my list of ever growing habits. (I add a new habit about every 21 days)
Re: Don't Worry About Your Productivity, Worry About You
#7For good or bad, I can't express how much of changed person I'm due to Hacker News. It has taught me to question dogma wherever I can, that has given me a better understanding of how the world works, in other words, getting the birds eye view seat of the world. So, at my current standing, procrastination is good. Or quite simply, as they say "too much of everything is bad" applies to procrastination and everything in…
I like that angle! My personal rule of thumb is that when I know a community well enough to predict what the contents of a given comment thread will be, then I've learned most of what I can from my experience there.
Re: Don't Worry About Your Productivity, Worry About You
#8He's right that filling every spare moment with compulsive news-checking and fast content consumption is distracting and stressful, but there's no reason he can't apply focus and deliberation to his surfing habits just like he did for other areas of his life. Indulge in the things you enjoy, and when you feel them becoming compulsive, cut back. For me, ditching the web would have a profoundly alienating effect on my psyche.
Re: Don't Worry About Your Productivity, Worry About You
#9Anyone that blogs about giving up the Internet is doomed to failure and will realize the stupidity of it soon enough. Life isn't about productivity, these days being cut off from the Internet is to alienate contemporary society, there's nothing inherently better about reading books than hackernews. There is a place for both.
Whenever I read about someone that beleives that extreme and drastic measures are required it nearly always points to other more subtle issues that the escapism is happily providing distraction from.
This is just attention seeking.
Re: Don't Worry About Your Productivity, Worry About You
#10I have also been trying to slow down and it has had a profound effect on my overal performance and happiness. I think cutting out youtube and hacker news is a bit much though.
Cutting them out completely might be a little much. Limiting them is a great idea to be productive is a good idea though.
HN has perhaps had the least impact on my productivity of any site I've been addicted to. HN's procrast setting makes the addiction quite manageable in fact. If you set the timeout to integer hours between 5 minute blocks lost productivity is minimized.
What I find is I'll open ~5 comment sections, read, then leave for 2 hours. By the time I get back a significant portion of links have been replaced. Rinse and repeat. The key mechanism is the timeout forces me to break out of zombie reading and refocus on programming.
I would encourage anyone with a self-diagnosed HN addiction to turn on procrast.