201–210 of 236 posts
For a long time I felt (and now feel) the same as you. I just wanted to share an experience that, while completely anecdotal, is perhaps atypical, and has been one of the defining experiences of my life. I got the Internet as a birthday present on my 8th birthday, and pretty much disappeared from normal society for the next few years. The Internet was (and is) fascinating - I could learn anything, interact with peopl…
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Don't care about TV / movies / books / articles. Nothing you read / watch is going to dramatically change your life Then what will? How will you escape any local maxima without input from far away - far away in location, far away in time, far away in concept and ideas, far away in political, social, economic, artistic, &c. worldview from where you are? Why would you skip the lessons other people took decades to learn…
>Then what will? So you assume that TV (80% crap), movies (pure entertainment, excluding documentaries, which are also mostly crap anyway), books (60% crap) and articles (90% assholes with opinions) are the only possible sources of information? Do you really think there's nothing conspicuously missing from there? Here's a hint: it's the origin of all the above and can provide more than all of them combined.
Are you suggesting it's easier to go talk to him than it is to read his writings? Or that the people you talk to can and will tell you everything his writings could teach you?
No I'm not tautologically suggesting that awful TV shows are amazing. Nor am I saying that you can't learn from living people you talk to, which is why I qualified with 'local maxima' and 'far away'. Your friends, your HN topic choices, your business contacts, are to some extent an echo chamber of people doing things you do, liking things you like, sharing the world views you share.
Reading the life experience of people who did things we can't do, experienced things we will never experience, lived in political and social situations that don't exist anymore, saw and dreamed of things in ways we just aren't thinking about ... is pretty unique.
Remember: Jack of all trades is a master of none.
You want to do everything or do just one thing and be a master in it?
I'd say, try following Google's Philosophy #2 https://www.google.com/intl/en/about/company/philosophy/
1. Give up news. Not necessarily Hacker News, although it's an idea, but mainstream newspaper, television, radio etc. news. It's remarkably easy to cut out completely in one fell swoop and can make an enormous difference to your mental real estate. You won't miss it, you won't miss out (the big stuff will find its way to you regardless) and it can actually be an entertaining challenge to be religious about avoiding i…
Read your questions, skimmed the comments and decided I'd share a technique for life management. A warning, it is a very, very long comment and I apologize sincerely. This matter is just a personally experienced one and I possess strong opinions regarding it. You do not have to read it, and I cannot make you do so, but I highly suggest that you do. The information I provide may not be for everyone. I understand this.…
"800 articles I have yet to read...Currently my instapaper account has some 800 articles I have yet to read. Kindle has about 10 books I want to read...pinboard account has about 100 unread article" The following is just my opinion and I don't mean to be antagonistic. However, IMHO, your issue is that you think that being aware of topics is equivalent to truly understanding those topics. If you were really interested…
I don't understand how you can do a full on attack on the OP without knowing him or his situation. You seem to think that a person has nothing else during his day than read every piece of news that comes their way. It might be a good idea to consider the fact that some people are extremely busy (with work or other tasks) but still want to stay informed. Those people would probably come across a piece of news or artic…
But, I think you're missing my point - the information overload, in this particular case, seems to be a direct result of the decision to continually add articles to their list all the while knowing that they are never going to be able to find enough time to read them.
"You seem to think that a person has nothing else during his day than read every piece of news that comes their way."
I understand that my post could have been interpreted in this way, but what I actually meant was that if you are truly interested in something, start making time for that interest. Sure, no one can drop everything they're doing whenever they want to pursue each of their interests every time they arise. However, you can make the decision to create time for your interests - and this means prioritizing your interests.
I really recommend meditation. Other than that, you just need to accept that you'll never be able go through it all. And prioritize what's most important to your life. And sometimes just lay it all aside and recharge. But meditation has really healped me with all of these. And in the end it's quite of a high-quality problem.
Meditation is wonderful. I've been meditating for 13 years at the remarkable multi-day retreats managed and run by dhamma.org. I would caution that the instruction is given by video recording by S.N. Goenka, who is a man with great faith in Buddhist scripture, and that faith pops out pretty strongly in places (e.g. karmic rebirth). If you can forgive that, he is careful to stress that the practical aspects of the tec…
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> So now I spend a lot of time on very strict information diets. What helped me was signing up to newsletters. Once a week I get newsletters summarising the most interesting links for HN, and also ones about Python, Big Data and Data Science. I redirect HN/Reddit/Facebook to 127.0.0.1 in my hosts file, because going to these sites is an automatic reaction in a browser, and all I need is a 404 to remind myself why I n…
For HN, there's the fantastic HNDigest[1] that sends you a summary email of the day's top posts. 1. http://www.hndigest.com/
Would love any feedback on the service!
You should try David Allen's GTD system. I'm pretty angry at myself for not having tried to understand and apply it earlier (had been reading about it for many years before..) it really is a great holistic concept to give structure to your most precious finite resources (brain, time). Also delete your RSS reader, loopback HN and other "educational" sites to localhost (subscribe to http://www.hndigest.com instead) and…
Actually, it for this same need (where I was becoming ADD by constantly checking HN) that I created HNdigest.com)