Information is like snacks, money, and drugs to the brain

It took a long time, but now I can easily read for an hour. My normal routine now is to wake up an hour before I have to and read for an hour or so, and then again in the evening read for an hour or so. Reading a book in the morning is really a great way to start the day, I find. I still prefer ending the day falling asleep to the office or something like that.

One of the things that has really worked for me, other than training the practical side of reading for prolonged amounts of time with focus, is to get used to preferring long pieces instead of the quick fixes that is mostly what's online. Before I wanted the quick reads, they felt like I achieved things. Now I want the long pieces, the books, the journalistic marvels that took years to produce and an hour or more to really go through properly. It took time to get here, getting rid of the fear of missing out - which I'm still working on - and understanding that all sorts of things happen in the "now", but almost anything of importance and substance is best "consumed" at a distance - maybe a week or more after it happens. That's especially true for news, except for the odd once that you want to know about right now, but I feel like when that happens, word will get to your from other paths, like family, friends and so on contacting you if it's that important. Any news that is not important enough to warrant your attention after it's a week old, is it really worth knowing anyway?

>"He told me, Ryan while people wait for the right moment, there are two types of time: Dead time—where they are passive and biding and Alive time—where they are learning and acting and leveraging every second towards their intended future. Which will this be for you?"[1]

Social media is mostly dead time (I would say all dead time, but someone will probably give me shit about it), as is reading the short form versions of the news, TMZ, skimming an article instead of reading the whole thing, etc.

If you spend 30 minutes a day studying a new language you can achieve amazing results in less than a year. Instead of wasting time on facebook, bring a kindle and read about something interesting. Compound growth is very real, and more people should take advantage of it.

>"Compound growth gets discussed as a financial concept, but it works in careers as well, and it is magic. A small productivity gain, compounded over 50 years, is worth a lot. So it’s worth figuring out how to optimize productivity. If you get 10% more done and 1% better every day compared to someone else, the compounded difference is massive. " [2]

>"You observe that most great scientists have tremendous drive. I worked for ten years with John Tukey at Bell Labs. He had tremendous drive. One day about three or four years after I joined, I discovered that John Tukey was slightly younger than I was. John was a genius and I clearly was not. Well I went storming into Bode’s office and said, How can anybody my age know as much as John Tukey does? He leaned back in his chair, put his hands behind his head, grinned slightly, and said, You would be surprised Hamming, how much you would know if you worked as hard as he did that many years. I simply slunk out of the office!

What Bode was saying was this: Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest. Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works 10% more than the other, the latter will more than twice outproduce the former. The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity - it is very much like compound interest. I don’t want to give you a rate, but it is a very high rate. Given two people with exactly the same ability, the one person who manages day in and day out to get in one more hour of thinking will be tremendously more productive over a lifetime. I took Bode’s remark to heart; I spent a good deal more of my time for some years trying to work a bit harder and I found, in fact, I could get more work done."[3]

End of rant.

[1] https://thoughtcatalog.com/ryan-holiday/2014/09/alive-time-v...

[2] https://blog.samaltman.com/productivity

[3] https://www.gwern.net/Spaced-repetition

It automates editing the hosts file and flushing DNS caches. It can operate as a whitelist or a blacklist.

... but then I found myself using Safari to get around that allowance.

There's also Forest [2], which "gamifies" staying away from websites for a certain time. It's the Chrome extension version of the Forest iOS app [3] to stay away from your phone.

I like to think of StayFocusd as the stick, and Forest as the carrot.

[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stayfocusd/laankej...

[2] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/forest-stay-focuse...

[3] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/forest-stay-focused/id86645051...