Not the same thing. The idea is to physically move your body far enough away from one or the other. You can only do one at a time. Your reptilian brain must sense that something is wrong (or right). Flicking a switch while still sitting on your butt isn't enough.
What also works is Freedom (mac only): http://www.ibiblio.org/fred/freedom/
It disables ethernet for a specific period of time. You can only turn it off by rebooting. It's drastic (but I need drastic).
Another option, for those using an apple Airport Base Station, is to activate the Timed Access control for your computer's MAC address. I, for instance, cut off my net access between 9am and 5pm on the weekend.
A decade ago or so when the web wasn't quite as distracting games were my biggest distraction. On my main machine I dual booted Windows and Linux. Linux was for work and Windows was for games (Quake/Starcraft mostly).
It was extremely helpful that I could very visibly go from one mode to the other. My mind would totally shift into a different gear as I made the decision to choose Linux or Windows at the lilo prompt.
I like the separate computer concept. Is there a way to make that more practical for people who are developing websites on their primary computer? I'd like to be able to get at the websites I own and the core documentation at least. I feel like you could co-opt some of these child-safe browsing tools to only let you on to the sites that were necessary for work. Maybe this could be the next step for rescuetime--only let me on to sites that I said were productive.
I think restricting to Google and Wikipedia (or sites directly accessed through Google or Wikipedia) would cover 99% of my productive use of the internet.
You could have the work computer get a filtered internet connection through the "internet computer" similar to the way some companies filter the internet.
One wonders how hard it would be to hack up a tool that enforced a time limit on sites that were flagged (by you, in Rescuetime) as time-wasters. You know, after 15 minutes on slashdot.org the hosts file gets rewritten to automatically rickroll all requests to slashdot.
I'm not sure if RescueTime has a public API, but I think it already has the triggers and warnings and feeds that you would need to drive this.
I think part of the problem for me is having gone through public school. When you're 13, sneaking out of the lunch room to read Slashdot in the library is literally the most productive thing you could be doing during that time period. Even in high school I would have learned more by reading Reddit, had it existed, than by doing most of the homework I was assigned. The basic issue is that when you're in school you're basically forcibly prevented from doing anything productive, so the best possible outcome is to try to learn something. But at that age, when you're still young and don't know that much, you can actually learn more from surfing the web than from anything that goes on in the classroom. (School did so much to suck the joy out of reading that reading was simply out of the question for a good five year chunk of my life.)
I think the real issue is learning to realize when A) you now have the freedom to do productive things, so surfing the web is no longer a good use of your time and B) you've outgrown a given discourse group and hanging out with a certain crowd is no longer a productive use of your time. But for some reason internalizing these things is a really difficult thing to do.
Yes, but how will assigning blame help you solve the problem? You have a problem, you know the solution, and you keep maintaining the problem because you perceive this problem as not being your fault, but somehow the fault of external factors.
Most problems exist in isolation of their causes. Let's say you have a flat tire on the highway. Sure, it would be interesting to know how it happened, but that has nothing to do with the problem. The problem is that you are on a highway with a flat tire. The solution is to fix the flat tire. How it happened is not relevant.
"You have a problem, you know the solution, and you keep maintaining the problem because you perceive this problem as not being your fault, but somehow the fault of external factors."
In all seriousness, I don't see how you get this from the my comment, esp. in light of the second paragraph. My basic argument is just that surfing the web is rational for an intellectually curious person in the context of compulsory schooling, but that it's a difficult habit to shake once the context changes and it's no longer rational. I think you're reading too much into this.
> because everyone is free to do whatever they want.
Citation needed.
> It's rare to find the man who realizes that everything he fails at is ultimately his own fault
Incompatible with the other claim.
If other people are free to do whatever they want, they are free not to cooperate with you. If you fail to get Megan Fox to want to engage in mating behavior with you, it may well be due to circumstances beyond your control, like not being her "type".
We aren't free. We have a lot of built-in unconscious drives that push and pull us in one direction or another. Our decision-making process is wired up through genetic happenstance and upbringing. Our parents, schools, cultures, and religions programmed us to a large degree and then turned us out into the world.
If I cannot lay Megan Fox, it's because she decided not to. Excercising my freedom does not give me the right to take away someone elses freedom. If however, Miss Fox says no to me, and I take that to mean that I will fail with all chicks from then on, then that is my own bloody fault, and its something I can change easily by trying for other chicks.
So when someone blames his reading of reddit on his high school, I say that's silly, and its something he is absolutely in control of, and can change without affecting anybody elses freedom.
"Excercising my freedom does not give me the right to take away someone elses freedom."
Nonetheless, in this hypothetical situation, you failed in your quest to lay Megan. Therefore, by your own words, it is your own fault.
This myth, that it is your own fault if you fail to achieve your own goals, forms the foundation for conservative viewpoint in this nation. I'm not here to preach the gospel of the Left (they have their own mistaken views too), but you have to concede, as heart-breaking as it is, that the Right isn't always either.
Recognizing a situation for what it actually is necessitates that we take human behavior as an animal into consideration when observing our own behavior. Taken in the original context of the statement, the author's claim that our failures are "our" fault is an indictment, not merely an observation.
"Failure" is never just a black-and-white situation. We live in a complex, chaotic world. It's time it's addressed as such.
"School did so much to suck the joy out of reading that reading was simply out of the question for a good five year chunk of my life."
This is quite a curious thing to say, and I'm taking it quite literally: assuming this is true, how is it that you know so much?
Have you "made up" for your lost time after high school? Or were you actually learning, but latently? If the former, that's pretty amazing efficiency. If the latter, what part of school do you think it was that caused this?
An alternative is this: What I do (using my super secret self designed software) is that I monitor my usage of the internet, and for every hour firefox is open, I send $10 to my credit card account. So while I procrastinate, I lose cash money but repay my debts.
RescueTime is not a sticky app. You can install it and forget about it completly. Sending money out of my account is something that I see everytime I open my bank account.
I'm just making myself aware that in spending time on these sites, I'm taking away from my on-hand cash and moving it to a location that it will be difficult to extract from. So I'm doubling the loss involved in procrastinating.
The loss is just a short term loss with a longer term profit, but being the animals we are, the short term profit overweighs the long term profit, so I tend to keep this in balance.
Also, if I procrastinate a bit, but them work very effectively, I will earn money to cover for what I lost earlier. So it balances out.
The reason its super secret is that it works with my bank account only with my banks online banking. It would only work there, so no need to try to make it available to others.
It just happened to me. Ran into a problem while programming and fired up HN and started reading PG's article. Now how do I get out of this time sink again?
What about having the other computer that's connected to the internet be physically uncomfortable to use for an extended period of time? Maybe force yourself to stand to use that computer?
I've found that it never works long-term. Your habits just adjust to the new situation. Every year ('cept the last couple, when I've been working) I go on vacation for 2-3 weeks to my parents' summer cottage, where there is no Internet access, no cell reception, not even a touch-tone phone. I find that I'm super productive for about the first 3 days, and then I end up playing a lot of Hearts.
Without the different environment, the effect is even shorter-lived. I had a paper due once in college. Knowing that I wasn't about to do it, I handed my Ethernet cord to a friend and said "Don't let me have this back until tomorrow." And - as ridiculous as the article suggests it is - I sat at my desk doing absolutely nothing all night. Really. I was basically staring off into space the whole time.
The only thing that seems to work for me is to make whatever I'm working on significantly more fun than what I should be doing. So for example, I got a ton done on my startup between 3/15 and 4/10 because I said "Okay, I'll just put off my taxes until after my startup's in better shape." And then my taxes got done with no fuss because I was really burned out from all that coding, and filling out a few tax forms actually seemed more enjoyable than writing another line of code. This is another plus of living with parents: they give you chores, so you can say "Yeah, I'll run to the post office for you, just let me finish this feature."
BTW, I didn't quit watching TV by any conscious act of willpower; I quit because I got addicted to MMORPGs. And then I quit MMORPGs because I got addicted to Starcraft, and then I quit StarCraft because I got addicted to HP fanfiction, then I quit fandom because I got addicted to computer websites. A distraction never seems to go away until you find something to replace it with.
yeah. It's still reading, and most of it is either educational or pseudo educational. Well.. at least if you waste your time where I waste mine. HN, Slasdot, Linux Today, Free Software Daily, Freenode (irc), etc.
However, I should be coding my app. I've spent most of the day working on a mock up so it's ok to spend a few minute here right?
This is the thing that nobody seems to have mentioned - both about WoW and HN: they're very different from watching TV. They're both inherently social, for example.
HN is much more akin to what sports fans do at sports bars (but asynchronous and otherwise more efficient). How much time is "too much time" to spend here depends on what else is going on in your life, but it's definitely not something to shun altogether (like cable TV).
WoW is also very different from TV - I haven't played since high school, but I remember it requiring quite a bit of interpersonal skill to organize and lead 40-man raids: settling people's personal issues, coordinating teams, etc. Maybe I romanticized it (as I did most things in high school), but I'd imagine that the kind of teamwork one learns from being in a large guild doing end-game raids comes in really useful in any organization.
My ex-wife left me for her WoW guild leader. It's a rather addictive game, but I wouldn't exactly categorize it as social, because the 'social' atmosphere evaporates as soon as you quit the game. Social as long as you keep playing, perhaps, like drug addicts' societies, or IRC.
As for avoiding distractions, I agree with Paul that the Internet is like crack, it's really bad. Like Paul, I never watched TV. (As an aside, I think the reason most people are so dumb is because they watch a lot of TV). The Internet is like TV -- it makes one dumb, it's like crack, but it's also unavoidable when working as a programmer. I used to deal with the Internet by removing the wireless card from the laptop, and physically walking to my 'work location', which didn't have a LAN port, to get work done.
The problem with that now is that I need to use the Internet frequently to SSH into servers, download libraries, programs, and so forth, simply to get work done. I suppose I only have about 15 libraries that I use with the typical program that I'm writing. So maybe the overhead cost of me browsing the Internet and wasting time doing so is high enough that it would be better to go back to the old setup.
I'm particularly interested on your take on various forms of distractions, given your response to my question about frustration.
Distraction can be used to kill frustration, but there's likely a secret, a skill, or a science in utilizing it, in the sense that it takes your mind off of something enough to change your approach, reinvigorate your interest, or whatever.
You talked about working on completely irrelevant projects for "long" periods of time. That somewhat qualifies as a thorough distraction. But then you say something like you find yourself return with greater competence [1]. From experience, have you found a good strategy? As in, magnitude of problem vs. type/duration of distraction?
I'm further interested in anybody else's "skillful use of distraction"; do share :-)
Something I realized after I wrote that comment: all the side-projects mentioned used the same toolset as the main project, but used it for a different purpose. So for example:
1.) Scrutiny was a quick PHP-based course evaluation system, done entirely when I should've been working on a large PHP rewrite of a HP fanfiction site. It took 2 weeks, vs. 3 years for FictionAlley (all part time).
2.) Bootstrapacitor was a quick web.py app, done when I was trying to do the layout for Diffle.com (also web.py) and feeling pretty overwhelmed by the HTML/CSS aspect (I'd never done my own layouts before). It took 3 weeks, vs. 5 months for Diffle - in particular, the Bootstrapacitor layout was very, very simple, because I wanted it to be done quickly. When I came back to do the CSS for Diffle, it was really easy, and I was done in a week or so.
3.) ArcLite is a JavaScript interpreter, done when I was feeling burnt out from building JavaScript UI widgets for GameClay. It took 1 week vs. 8 months so far for GameClay. (GameClay has many parts besides the JavaScript UI though; I'd estimate I've only spent 2-3 months on JavaScript aspects, the rest being Python & Flash.)
4.) Randomicity was a Django app built soon after converting GameClay to Django, but before I've built significant amounts of GameClay code in Django. Took about a week or two, vs. 2-3 weeks spent on the Django part of GameClay.
Also, all of the projects I was procrastinating on were first major projects with that toolset, and all the side projects were under about 1-2k lines. (If I ever start a blog, I want to do an entry about the "no-man's land of software" - it seems like anything up to about 2k lines is quite easy and can be done in a week or so, then there's a giant no-man's land up to about 20k lines where it's really difficult to make progress, and then after that it gets easier again.)
I'm not sure what to make of this, but one hypothesis is that procrastination is actually a subconscious lack of competence. If you address the underlying skill deficit and then give it a rest, the project becomes fun again. (Assuming that the project is useful - I didn't avoid all that homework in school because I didn't know how to do it, I avoided it because it was pointless.) By working on a side project, I had a chance to consolidate and assimilate all the knowledge I'd gained from beating my head against the original problem. It's much like the effect of sleep: you know how when you work really hard at a difficult mental problem, get nowhere, and then sleep on it, the answer often comes naturally in the morning? This is a case of working really hard for months at a time, then switching gears and doing something easy but related for a short period of time, then coming back and finding that what was previously hard is significantly easier.
I have friends in physics grad programs that have noticed a similar effect. The physics curriculum in my undergrad college was setup like a spiral - you would do mechanics, then E&M, then thermodynamics, then quantum, then you'd return to mechanics at a higher mathematical level, then intermediate E&M, then intermediate quantum, then advanced E&M, etc. Now my friends are doing quantum field theory and find that the Lagrangians we slaved over as undergrads are trivial.
The Suzuki method of teaching violin is similar, too. The books are setup so that you have a couple easy pieces, then one really hard piece, then a few more easy pieces so you can relax and assimilate everything you've learned, then another hard piece and so on.
"[P]rocrastination is actually a subconscious lack of competence."
I agree, I think a sense of "perceived incompetence", insecurity and confusion can lead to procrastination.
Trying to define a problem well, or breaking it into smaller ones, can help a lot. The same logic can be applied to projects.
Keeping up with Reddit and HN can also lead to frustration (yes I see the irony :), there's so much happening in web development. If only there were a way to ignore fads and keep up with the really important trends...
I like this guys idea's on procrastination. I've been using it today I think. I should be doing homework. Instead, I've been working on my supposedly less important (definitely less urgent) startup. I've also been avoiding that business plan I want to write.
The procrastination thing puts you in good company: Andrew Tridgell apparently created Samba as a way of procrastinating while working on rsync for his doctoral thesis.
> The only thing that seems to work for me is to make whatever I'm working on significantly more fun than what I should be doing.
That's very true. Having two or more tasks at hand is always key, so that you can do the least intimidating of the two. The downside to this approach is that sometimes you really do need to do the more intimidating one.
I assume you've read Cassandra Claire's Draco Trilogy by now, since just about everyone has. If not...well, I think it's been pulled off the Internet since the author got published with real books...
There's also Nemesis's I Am Lord Voldemort (http://www.spookamania.com/Quills/viewstory.php?sid=36), which is a little amateurish but still a pretty good story. The author's actually incredibly ashamed of it (she wrote it when she was 13), but it's better than anything I could do now...
What worked for me was leeching WiFi from the neighbors. It was a really weak signal, so I had to stand with my laptop pressed against the window. Never been more productive!
I prefer Paul's wider take on things, it's what makes his writing so unique, it encompasses almost anything and everything.
I've thought many times about quitting programming altogether because it's in some ways such a narrow and suffocating field, which can relate to, yet fails to relate to, so many real world issues. Paul grasps, combines and presents these issues admirably.
My counterwish, therefore, is to say don't change your writing one bit!
I like the idea of two different computers. Knowing the kinds of people who read PG essays and frequent HN, the "work" computer would invariably be some flavor of Unix. Perhaps you could get rid of X and just run in console mode. This would mean even fewer distractions.
I had an idea for "manual overclocking" once. It would be a crank sticking out of the front of a PC that you could turn to overclock your processor when you really needed it. Mostly it was a therapy for waiting on slow processes. No, I didn't make one, although now I hop on News.YC or some similar site when I have to wait for too long, so there may still be something there.
You could adapt that idea here, with the Gilligan's Island concept of "powering" certain tasks. It would be interesting to configure your computer to require you to regularly move your mouse (or finger on your trackpad) to keep the browser window from fading away or to "power" a check of your email. But could you make it annoying enough?
This is a bit tangential:
Every start-up that YC funds is potentially worth an essay. Isn't that why they are funded? They solve a problem that nags many. So I am not surprised to see Rescue Time linked in there (The title itself is a sure bet that it would).
However, given the wide reach of pg's articles (beyond news.YC), should the link merit a disclosure? There's a fuzzy notion of when that needs to be done and I am intrigued by what these notions are. People would be baying for Michael Arrington's blood if he was found responsible for such an omission, but I am guessing it is a non-issue here. So what's the difference? A higher implicit trust-ranking for pg? An assumption that everyone already knows about the linkages between YC and RescueTime? Or the fact that these essays aren't actively promoted by pg. That could be a factor even if the probability of his latest essay being posted within hours, here or elsewhere, is now close to one.
I think it's because nobody imagines pg would be lame enough to fund a bad product, and then promote it with his name. That would turn off lots of good potential YC applicants.
That it is a good product and appeals to many goes without saying no matter who the investor is. Presumably, every investor is behind a product because he/she sees some merit.
Yeah, hence the part about Paul Graham. Some people have audiences but not credibility. Paul Graham seems to have gotten his audience because of his credibility . It wouldn't be evil to do what you're worried about. It would just be dumb.
You are right on spot. PG really should update with full disclosure. I didn't click on the link, and it crossed my mind that it could be that Dilbertesque piece of software, but PG's credibility with me made me discredit the thought. This is an obviously blatant conflict of interest... isn't it supposed to be just an "essay"?
PG and others, instead of using 2 computers, you might want to try what works for me.
I used RescueTime for a few months before realizing I was asking the wrong question i.e. (Where & how long do I spend my online time?).
The correct question, for me, was to spend as much time online as I wanted as long as I have completed the things I wanted. Once you start browsing, while you are supposed to be working, you go into this downward spiral, and before you know it, it's the end of the day, and you have not done much.
So, a better solution for me, is to enable this gem of a software called Freedom (http://www.ibiblio.org/fred/freedom/) that disables all wireless & ethernet networking on my computer for up to three hours at a time, and I can go about doing my work for those hours. At the end of it browse a bit, and enable Freedom again.
"The correct question, for me, was to spend as much time online as I wanted as long as I have completed the things I wanted."
I've tried this, and it's generally a better approach, but then I run into a new question: what do I want to complete today? There's always more work that I could be doing, and it's sometimes hard to judge what's a fair day's worth of work.
For example, I finished one feature yesterday, compared to a dozen commits on Wednesday (and an average of about 2-3 features/day). But it was a feature that's been bugging me for a couple weeks so far, while Wednesday's work was a couple misc features, some added unit tests, updating to a new version of JQuery UI, and a lot of refactoring. When I was working on yesterday's feature, it was very much a "Shit, I haven't done anything today" - but that was because it was a hard feature to implement that required a lot of thought into how it integrated with the rest of the system. While on Wednesday, if I'd stopped after 2 svn commits, I would've done a grand total of 8 lines of work.
Also, I've found that my attitude towards more work changes significantly after finishing a new feature. Before check-in, I was like "Damnit, I can't wait for this to be over, I wonder what's on news.YC", while afterwards, I was like "Hmm, I wonder what else I can add." (I didn't add anything because it was 11:30 PM, but I probably could've worked in a few small bugfixes.)
I'm going to say something unpopular now, so be warned.
Is wasting time on..TV, MMORPGs, the Internet, senseless magazines etc. really that much of a problem for us as individuals? Procrastinating obviously robs time from "useful" activities like working, but how much use are these activities, really? Work applied correctly certainly brings humanity as a whole to new and better pastures, but I'm wondering whether this is really the case for me as an individual.
Personally, I find it very pleasant to waste time. If I don't have anything in particular to do (when I'm on vacation, for instance), I get bored with whatever time-sinks I have in about two weeks and quickly move on to something that brings me forward as a person. But if there are demanding activities occupying my mind - when I study, or learn a new skill, or have a job - wasting time seems to become a natural and healthy part of my life. Four hours a day seems like a good ballpark figure - according to this I spend 28 hours every week doing nothing, in addition to whatever useful things I do the rest of the time. I fail to see how this is a problem.
To me it seems as if recreation naturally follows from any demanding activity. If you get 8 hours of real work done every day, what is the problem if another four are spent doing nothing? Or even if you only get four hours of real work done every day, or two, you will still produce more wealth than an average Joe would be able to produce 80 years ago. I guess what I'm questioning is the aspiration of being great if you don't find it natural.
Doesn't this apply even, as PG writes in "How to do what you love", if your work is the most interesting and rewarding part of your life? Even great minds need rest.
I was also wondering whether web surfing is really a "waste of time". Would I be better off if I had never come to this site, never read hacker news comments and pg essays and using all this "wasted" time to become better in a programming language, instead? I know, you will probably be more succesful if you stay focused but there is so much interesting information in the internet and what the hell, you only leave once.
This is a good point. I don't mean to imply one should do nothing but work. The problem with many types of procrastination is that they're not even all that fun.
I think the right thing to do is when you work, really work, and when you're just having fun, really have fun.
> The problem with many types of procrastination is that they're not even all that fun.
There was a period in my life, at my first job, where I was so fed up and bored with what I was supposed to be working on that I just avoided it by surfing the net all day, for months. You would think that goofing off all day on the internet and getting paid for it would be fun, but honestly it made things even worse.
Procrastination seems to be like a drug... it can be refreshing (or at least not painful) in small doses, but after a while you just get strung out and depressed. I had this huge weight over my head about what I "should be doing," but absolutely no motivation to actually do it. It took a conscious act of avoiding my web browser to stop that pattern of self-destructive behavior and get some work done again.
So yeah, anyway, just wanted to add my data point. Procrastinating can often make your mental well being worse off, by throwing in guilt on top of whatever was bothering you in the first place.
The problem is that for most of us those four hours you feel ok about spending doing nothing are the only hours of the day that can be used for appreciably changing your life. For most employees those four hours are all their non-work hours that are truly discretionary and awake. If they don't use those productively they will be employees all their life until they retire. By then they will probably have forgotten what they really wanted to do in life and perhaps be too tired, run down, and or poor to do anything about it if they do remember or discover it.
If you are doing what you really want to do in your "work life" then I could see it. But if you are really doing what you want to do I sort of doubt that their are 4 hours a day that you could do something with that you would blow doing something other than "what you really want to do". We are not talking hobbies, keeping up with literature, exploring interesting things here so much as like sitting in front of the Tube or the equivalent, vegging.
Donald Knuth has a dedicated work computer, too - but apparently completely without network capabilities:
I currently use Ubuntu Linux, on a standalone laptop—it has
no Internet connection. I occasionally carry flash memory
drives between this machine and the Macs that I use for
network surfing and graphics;
For personal reasons, I do not browse the web from my computer. (I also have not net connection much of the time.) To look at page I send mail to a demon which runs wget and mails the page back to me. It is very efficient use of my time, but it is slow in real time. [1]
That's fine if you're PG and you write all the software yourself, but what if you're using a web framework or other open-source tools and need the web to access documentation or ask questions?
How about downloading the documentation to your work computer and using that local copy? If the docs fail, you can use the other computer to ask questions.
And I found that with google and irc I became lazy. Instead of just looking at the code of the framework to understand it when I have a problem (which is good for improving myself as a programmer), I just do a quick search on google or irc hoping that someone gives me an answer...
Or even just installing Google Desktop and searching that when you are offline since it seems to index most HTML files you look at or are on your machine
After reading your comment and others', I realized that iptables might be able to help out here. I wrote up an Ask HN ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=192953 ) which shows my current setup for throttling internet usage. Granted, storing pages in the browser cache is one great way to access documentation, but throttling might allow one to add pages to the cache while keeping procrastination at bay.
This is what I meant when I said the long-term solution might be software that controlled how you used the Internet, rather than simply turning off wifi.
> This is what I meant when I said the long-term solution might be software
And I thought that was just a not-so-subtle plug for YC-funded companies ;)
PS - I guess these things aren't intentionally PR-ish. If anyone spends time talking to startup founders who are solving problems, it's only natural to start incorporating these problems into your world-view...
It wasn't because we funded Rescuetime that I wrote about this problem, but because I already thought this problem was so important that we funded Rescuetime.
I've found personally I don't need to block the whole internet - just the top few procrastination websites - facebook, reddit, slashdot, bbc news etc. that I'd otherwise be tempted to read.
There's a Firefox extension called LeechBlock ( http://www.proginosko.com/leechblock.html ) that will do that for you, and allow fine control over how long or when the sites are blocked as well as the option to stop you simply disabling it during these time periods.
But you can still use the web for research.
(Hope it didn't sound too much like an advert, but it's helped me).
Excellent advice. I solved 80% part of the problem two days ago by simply blocking news.yc at the hosts file level on my main machine. My laptop is now my news.yc machine. It is hilarious to have PG publish the same solution two days later. :)
I tried the noprocrast setting on this site. Reading between the lines of his essay, I surmise that PG, like me, has evolved around noprocrast. My lizard brain has figured out how to click the override button before my conscious mind can notice.
Most of the rest of the stuff I read is a few dozen blogs. They update through RSS, and there are few enough of them (and I skim quickly enough) that they aren't a big time sink. It's news.yc -- which tends to embroil me in writing -- that's the sink.
Of course, there are worse ways to waste time than news.yc. Sometimes you need to tell yourself that.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 266 ms ] threadIt was extremely helpful that I could very visibly go from one mode to the other. My mind would totally shift into a different gear as I made the decision to choose Linux or Windows at the lilo prompt.
I'm not saying there can be only one though.
I'm not sure if RescueTime has a public API, but I think it already has the triggers and warnings and feeds that you would need to drive this.
I think the real issue is learning to realize when A) you now have the freedom to do productive things, so surfing the web is no longer a good use of your time and B) you've outgrown a given discourse group and hanging out with a certain crowd is no longer a productive use of your time. But for some reason internalizing these things is a really difficult thing to do.
Most problems exist in isolation of their causes. Let's say you have a flat tire on the highway. Sure, it would be interesting to know how it happened, but that has nothing to do with the problem. The problem is that you are on a highway with a flat tire. The solution is to fix the flat tire. How it happened is not relevant.
In all seriousness, I don't see how you get this from the my comment, esp. in light of the second paragraph. My basic argument is just that surfing the web is rational for an intellectually curious person in the context of compulsory schooling, but that it's a difficult habit to shake once the context changes and it's no longer rational. I think you're reading too much into this.
It's rare to find the man who realizes that everything he fails at is ultimately his own fault, because everyone is free to do whatever they want.
Citation needed.
> It's rare to find the man who realizes that everything he fails at is ultimately his own fault
Incompatible with the other claim.
If other people are free to do whatever they want, they are free not to cooperate with you. If you fail to get Megan Fox to want to engage in mating behavior with you, it may well be due to circumstances beyond your control, like not being her "type".
We aren't free. We have a lot of built-in unconscious drives that push and pull us in one direction or another. Our decision-making process is wired up through genetic happenstance and upbringing. Our parents, schools, cultures, and religions programmed us to a large degree and then turned us out into the world.
So when someone blames his reading of reddit on his high school, I say that's silly, and its something he is absolutely in control of, and can change without affecting anybody elses freedom.
Nonetheless, in this hypothetical situation, you failed in your quest to lay Megan. Therefore, by your own words, it is your own fault.
This myth, that it is your own fault if you fail to achieve your own goals, forms the foundation for conservative viewpoint in this nation. I'm not here to preach the gospel of the Left (they have their own mistaken views too), but you have to concede, as heart-breaking as it is, that the Right isn't always either.
Recognizing a situation for what it actually is necessitates that we take human behavior as an animal into consideration when observing our own behavior. Taken in the original context of the statement, the author's claim that our failures are "our" fault is an indictment, not merely an observation.
"Failure" is never just a black-and-white situation. We live in a complex, chaotic world. It's time it's addressed as such.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error
This is quite a curious thing to say, and I'm taking it quite literally: assuming this is true, how is it that you know so much?
Have you "made up" for your lost time after high school? Or were you actually learning, but latently? If the former, that's pretty amazing efficiency. If the latter, what part of school do you think it was that caused this?
The loss is just a short term loss with a longer term profit, but being the animals we are, the short term profit overweighs the long term profit, so I tend to keep this in balance.
Also, if I procrastinate a bit, but them work very effectively, I will earn money to cover for what I lost earlier. So it balances out.
No matter how much you have (or don't have) it's always smart to give yourself some extra help.
2 terminals is a great idea. Kinda like keeping the junk food in the other room. I'm less likely to partake if I have to "change modes" to do so.
"Lead me not into temptation, I'll find it myself."
Without the different environment, the effect is even shorter-lived. I had a paper due once in college. Knowing that I wasn't about to do it, I handed my Ethernet cord to a friend and said "Don't let me have this back until tomorrow." And - as ridiculous as the article suggests it is - I sat at my desk doing absolutely nothing all night. Really. I was basically staring off into space the whole time.
The only thing that seems to work for me is to make whatever I'm working on significantly more fun than what I should be doing. So for example, I got a ton done on my startup between 3/15 and 4/10 because I said "Okay, I'll just put off my taxes until after my startup's in better shape." And then my taxes got done with no fuss because I was really burned out from all that coding, and filling out a few tax forms actually seemed more enjoyable than writing another line of code. This is another plus of living with parents: they give you chores, so you can say "Yeah, I'll run to the post office for you, just let me finish this feature."
BTW, I didn't quit watching TV by any conscious act of willpower; I quit because I got addicted to MMORPGs. And then I quit MMORPGs because I got addicted to Starcraft, and then I quit StarCraft because I got addicted to HP fanfiction, then I quit fandom because I got addicted to computer websites. A distraction never seems to go away until you find something to replace it with.
I suspect that's where most people reading this site are.
However, I should be coding my app. I've spent most of the day working on a mock up so it's ok to spend a few minute here right?
I should also be doing homework.
HN is much more akin to what sports fans do at sports bars (but asynchronous and otherwise more efficient). How much time is "too much time" to spend here depends on what else is going on in your life, but it's definitely not something to shun altogether (like cable TV).
WoW is also very different from TV - I haven't played since high school, but I remember it requiring quite a bit of interpersonal skill to organize and lead 40-man raids: settling people's personal issues, coordinating teams, etc. Maybe I romanticized it (as I did most things in high school), but I'd imagine that the kind of teamwork one learns from being in a large guild doing end-game raids comes in really useful in any organization.
As for avoiding distractions, I agree with Paul that the Internet is like crack, it's really bad. Like Paul, I never watched TV. (As an aside, I think the reason most people are so dumb is because they watch a lot of TV). The Internet is like TV -- it makes one dumb, it's like crack, but it's also unavoidable when working as a programmer. I used to deal with the Internet by removing the wireless card from the laptop, and physically walking to my 'work location', which didn't have a LAN port, to get work done.
The problem with that now is that I need to use the Internet frequently to SSH into servers, download libraries, programs, and so forth, simply to get work done. I suppose I only have about 15 libraries that I use with the typical program that I'm writing. So maybe the overhead cost of me browsing the Internet and wasting time doing so is high enough that it would be better to go back to the old setup.
Ewww.
Distraction can be used to kill frustration, but there's likely a secret, a skill, or a science in utilizing it, in the sense that it takes your mind off of something enough to change your approach, reinvigorate your interest, or whatever.
You talked about working on completely irrelevant projects for "long" periods of time. That somewhat qualifies as a thorough distraction. But then you say something like you find yourself return with greater competence [1]. From experience, have you found a good strategy? As in, magnitude of problem vs. type/duration of distraction?
I'm further interested in anybody else's "skillful use of distraction"; do share :-)
[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=191503
1.) Scrutiny was a quick PHP-based course evaluation system, done entirely when I should've been working on a large PHP rewrite of a HP fanfiction site. It took 2 weeks, vs. 3 years for FictionAlley (all part time).
2.) Bootstrapacitor was a quick web.py app, done when I was trying to do the layout for Diffle.com (also web.py) and feeling pretty overwhelmed by the HTML/CSS aspect (I'd never done my own layouts before). It took 3 weeks, vs. 5 months for Diffle - in particular, the Bootstrapacitor layout was very, very simple, because I wanted it to be done quickly. When I came back to do the CSS for Diffle, it was really easy, and I was done in a week or so.
3.) ArcLite is a JavaScript interpreter, done when I was feeling burnt out from building JavaScript UI widgets for GameClay. It took 1 week vs. 8 months so far for GameClay. (GameClay has many parts besides the JavaScript UI though; I'd estimate I've only spent 2-3 months on JavaScript aspects, the rest being Python & Flash.)
4.) Randomicity was a Django app built soon after converting GameClay to Django, but before I've built significant amounts of GameClay code in Django. Took about a week or two, vs. 2-3 weeks spent on the Django part of GameClay.
Also, all of the projects I was procrastinating on were first major projects with that toolset, and all the side projects were under about 1-2k lines. (If I ever start a blog, I want to do an entry about the "no-man's land of software" - it seems like anything up to about 2k lines is quite easy and can be done in a week or so, then there's a giant no-man's land up to about 20k lines where it's really difficult to make progress, and then after that it gets easier again.)
I'm not sure what to make of this, but one hypothesis is that procrastination is actually a subconscious lack of competence. If you address the underlying skill deficit and then give it a rest, the project becomes fun again. (Assuming that the project is useful - I didn't avoid all that homework in school because I didn't know how to do it, I avoided it because it was pointless.) By working on a side project, I had a chance to consolidate and assimilate all the knowledge I'd gained from beating my head against the original problem. It's much like the effect of sleep: you know how when you work really hard at a difficult mental problem, get nowhere, and then sleep on it, the answer often comes naturally in the morning? This is a case of working really hard for months at a time, then switching gears and doing something easy but related for a short period of time, then coming back and finding that what was previously hard is significantly easier.
I have friends in physics grad programs that have noticed a similar effect. The physics curriculum in my undergrad college was setup like a spiral - you would do mechanics, then E&M, then thermodynamics, then quantum, then you'd return to mechanics at a higher mathematical level, then intermediate E&M, then intermediate quantum, then advanced E&M, etc. Now my friends are doing quantum field theory and find that the Lagrangians we slaved over as undergrads are trivial.
The Suzuki method of teaching violin is similar, too. The books are setup so that you have a couple easy pieces, then one really hard piece, then a few more easy pieces so you can relax and assimilate everything you've learned, then another hard piece and so on.
I agree, I think a sense of "perceived incompetence", insecurity and confusion can lead to procrastination.
Trying to define a problem well, or breaking it into smaller ones, can help a lot. The same logic can be applied to projects.
Keeping up with Reddit and HN can also lead to frustration (yes I see the irony :), there's so much happening in web development. If only there were a way to ignore fads and keep up with the really important trends...
I like this guys idea's on procrastination. I've been using it today I think. I should be doing homework. Instead, I've been working on my supposedly less important (definitely less urgent) startup. I've also been avoiding that business plan I want to write.
1. I dont waste time surfing or doing other distracting things for more than one hour a day.
2. When I dont feel like working, I sleep.
That's very true. Having two or more tasks at hand is always key, so that you can do the least intimidating of the two. The downside to this approach is that sometimes you really do need to do the more intimidating one.
I loved D.M.P's Sin of Lycaos (http://www.fictionalley.org/authors/d_m_p/SOL.html). Still do, actually...the ending still gives me chills.
There's also Nemesis's I Am Lord Voldemort (http://www.spookamania.com/Quills/viewstory.php?sid=36), which is a little amateurish but still a pretty good story. The author's actually incredibly ashamed of it (she wrote it when she was 13), but it's better than anything I could do now...
:)
I've thought many times about quitting programming altogether because it's in some ways such a narrow and suffocating field, which can relate to, yet fails to relate to, so many real world issues. Paul grasps, combines and presents these issues admirably.
My counterwish, therefore, is to say don't change your writing one bit!
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000339.html
You could adapt that idea here, with the Gilligan's Island concept of "powering" certain tasks. It would be interesting to configure your computer to require you to regularly move your mouse (or finger on your trackpad) to keep the browser window from fading away or to "power" a check of your email. But could you make it annoying enough?
However, given the wide reach of pg's articles (beyond news.YC), should the link merit a disclosure? There's a fuzzy notion of when that needs to be done and I am intrigued by what these notions are. People would be baying for Michael Arrington's blood if he was found responsible for such an omission, but I am guessing it is a non-issue here. So what's the difference? A higher implicit trust-ranking for pg? An assumption that everyone already knows about the linkages between YC and RescueTime? Or the fact that these essays aren't actively promoted by pg. That could be a factor even if the probability of his latest essay being posted within hours, here or elsewhere, is now close to one.
I used RescueTime for a few months before realizing I was asking the wrong question i.e. (Where & how long do I spend my online time?).
The correct question, for me, was to spend as much time online as I wanted as long as I have completed the things I wanted. Once you start browsing, while you are supposed to be working, you go into this downward spiral, and before you know it, it's the end of the day, and you have not done much.
So, a better solution for me, is to enable this gem of a software called Freedom (http://www.ibiblio.org/fred/freedom/) that disables all wireless & ethernet networking on my computer for up to three hours at a time, and I can go about doing my work for those hours. At the end of it browse a bit, and enable Freedom again.
I've tried this, and it's generally a better approach, but then I run into a new question: what do I want to complete today? There's always more work that I could be doing, and it's sometimes hard to judge what's a fair day's worth of work.
For example, I finished one feature yesterday, compared to a dozen commits on Wednesday (and an average of about 2-3 features/day). But it was a feature that's been bugging me for a couple weeks so far, while Wednesday's work was a couple misc features, some added unit tests, updating to a new version of JQuery UI, and a lot of refactoring. When I was working on yesterday's feature, it was very much a "Shit, I haven't done anything today" - but that was because it was a hard feature to implement that required a lot of thought into how it integrated with the rest of the system. While on Wednesday, if I'd stopped after 2 svn commits, I would've done a grand total of 8 lines of work.
Also, I've found that my attitude towards more work changes significantly after finishing a new feature. Before check-in, I was like "Damnit, I can't wait for this to be over, I wonder what's on news.YC", while afterwards, I was like "Hmm, I wonder what else I can add." (I didn't add anything because it was 11:30 PM, but I probably could've worked in a few small bugfixes.)
I agree. But, isn't this an independent question?
For such things an individual's flavor of "The Pmarca Guide to Personal Productivity" should help. http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/06/the_pmarca_guid.html
Also, look at this gem posted by edw519, :http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=191275
What do you think?
Is wasting time on..TV, MMORPGs, the Internet, senseless magazines etc. really that much of a problem for us as individuals? Procrastinating obviously robs time from "useful" activities like working, but how much use are these activities, really? Work applied correctly certainly brings humanity as a whole to new and better pastures, but I'm wondering whether this is really the case for me as an individual.
Personally, I find it very pleasant to waste time. If I don't have anything in particular to do (when I'm on vacation, for instance), I get bored with whatever time-sinks I have in about two weeks and quickly move on to something that brings me forward as a person. But if there are demanding activities occupying my mind - when I study, or learn a new skill, or have a job - wasting time seems to become a natural and healthy part of my life. Four hours a day seems like a good ballpark figure - according to this I spend 28 hours every week doing nothing, in addition to whatever useful things I do the rest of the time. I fail to see how this is a problem.
To me it seems as if recreation naturally follows from any demanding activity. If you get 8 hours of real work done every day, what is the problem if another four are spent doing nothing? Or even if you only get four hours of real work done every day, or two, you will still produce more wealth than an average Joe would be able to produce 80 years ago. I guess what I'm questioning is the aspiration of being great if you don't find it natural.
Doesn't this apply even, as PG writes in "How to do what you love", if your work is the most interesting and rewarding part of your life? Even great minds need rest.
"Observance of 'Fun Time' will be strictly enforced."
http://pbfcomics.com/?cid=PBF193-Fun_Bot.gif
There was a period in my life, at my first job, where I was so fed up and bored with what I was supposed to be working on that I just avoided it by surfing the net all day, for months. You would think that goofing off all day on the internet and getting paid for it would be fun, but honestly it made things even worse.
Procrastination seems to be like a drug... it can be refreshing (or at least not painful) in small doses, but after a while you just get strung out and depressed. I had this huge weight over my head about what I "should be doing," but absolutely no motivation to actually do it. It took a conscious act of avoiding my web browser to stop that pattern of self-destructive behavior and get some work done again.
So yeah, anyway, just wanted to add my data point. Procrastinating can often make your mental well being worse off, by throwing in guilt on top of whatever was bothering you in the first place.
If you are doing what you really want to do in your "work life" then I could see it. But if you are really doing what you want to do I sort of doubt that their are 4 hours a day that you could do something with that you would blow doing something other than "what you really want to do". We are not talking hobbies, keeping up with literature, exploring interesting things here so much as like sitting in front of the Tube or the equivalent, vegging.
For personal reasons, I do not browse the web from my computer. (I also have not net connection much of the time.) To look at page I send mail to a demon which runs wget and mails the page back to me. It is very efficient use of my time, but it is slow in real time. [1]
[1] http://lwn.net/Articles/262570/
And I thought that was just a not-so-subtle plug for YC-funded companies ;)
PS - I guess these things aren't intentionally PR-ish. If anyone spends time talking to startup founders who are solving problems, it's only natural to start incorporating these problems into your world-view...
There's a Firefox extension called LeechBlock ( http://www.proginosko.com/leechblock.html ) that will do that for you, and allow fine control over how long or when the sites are blocked as well as the option to stop you simply disabling it during these time periods.
But you can still use the web for research.
(Hope it didn't sound too much like an advert, but it's helped me).
I tried the noprocrast setting on this site. Reading between the lines of his essay, I surmise that PG, like me, has evolved around noprocrast. My lizard brain has figured out how to click the override button before my conscious mind can notice.
Most of the rest of the stuff I read is a few dozen blogs. They update through RSS, and there are few enough of them (and I skim quickly enough) that they aren't a big time sink. It's news.yc -- which tends to embroil me in writing -- that's the sink.
Of course, there are worse ways to waste time than news.yc. Sometimes you need to tell yourself that.