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Ask HN: Solution for Distraction?

8 points by psikomanjak ↗ HN
How to surpass the urge to check my social media or do something else when I am coding/doing a hard task? Sometimes it seems I can't control it and it just opens a page and goes to HN or Twitter or something.

I have tried the block the page but it doesn't make sense since I just can unblock them and it is not very effective

18 comments

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soueuls
I personally use Ritalin.

It's a drug given to people with ADHD, so I can't recommend it to everyone. But my productivity tripled since I start using it.

Raminj95
Only problem is that its so hard to get in some countries (im in sweden) i dont really get why its so super controlled over here :(
muzani
My ADHD friends joke that to get the ADHD medicine, you need to pass the obstacle course that's almost designed to screw over people with ADHD.
Qem
Probably the same reason doping is banned in sports. There's a threshold in the number of people using performance-enhancing substances, that causes it to stop being a choice for the rest of the people, and the situation becomes worse for everybody. A new baseline is set, and if you're not on them you can't compete. Something like that happened in pro cycling:

"Armstrong, on the other hand, was a cyclist competing at elite levels during an era in which doping was rampant. And in such a setting, it does at least arguably matter that “everybody does it.” It is an unfortunate fact that in the world Armstrong competed in, for every individual cyclist doping was a necessary evil, a way of keeping the playing field level. Any cyclist not engaging in doping was effectively relegating himself to the back of the pack. That’s not an excuse, but it’s an accurate description of the facts of the case. So doping was, in a sense, non-optional for the elite cyclist trying to do his job properly, because after all his job is to try to win." - https://archive.canadianbusiness.com/blogs-and-comment/lance...

AccountAccount1
When Armstrong was stripped of his title, they had to give it to the guy that came in like the 17th place as everyone under that was doping as well.
Qem
Now I fear something similar is happening at schools, as children get overdiagnosed with attention disorders. When I was small, I think it was better accepted as a fact of life that it was hard to make children sit still in a traditional school setting. Instead of fixing school, now we are trying to fix the children with drugs. In a setting with lot of medicated children, tolerance for previously deemed normal child behavior is diminishing. Parents freak out if their child isn't behaving as well as his/her medicated peers.
AccountAccount1
Yes, this is troubling. I'm generally not against medication, but giving it to children without exactly knowing how it affects their personality long-term is a very gray area.
agomez314
You've already mentioned you block tabs. Perhaps by exercising focus in other areas you can apply that to your internet habits. For example, try reading for 20mins a day without any distractions, or drawing, or anything else. Practicing deep focus in small increments, like a muscle, may help you in this case. Like exercising a muscle however, it takes time, perseverance, and small increments of load in order to improve. Best of luck!
methusala8
It is not possible to unblock the page if you use coldturkey and set its 'blocks'.

I have access to the distracting websites for an hour a day and that is it. It is blocked for the rest of the day. The free version is more than sufficient.

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spansoa
Have a dedicated window of time for The Thing you need to accomplish. Turn off your smartphone, and just hyperfocus. I even have a dedicated SSD which boots into an OS specifically tailored and configured for coding.
8vectors
It would probably help if you reduced dopamine spikes and made them more intermittent (less regular).

If you stack multiple pleasures together it could be making it harder to focus. (Like drinking + watching something you enjoy + snacks, or smoking weed + playing video games).

https://youtu.be/QmOF0crdyRU

This video explains the science behind it.

Make your dopamine spikes more random and intermittent and try to reduce the peak on them by sometimes enjoying your pleasures separately instead of stacking them all at the same time.

orange_fritter
There are a lot of tools to help change your online behavior. For instance, iPhone has the ScreenTime feature. I block reddit from 9am-6pm and only give myself 15 minutes of reddit outside of that. Turns out 15 minutes is more than sufficient to get your fill of reddit. Only my partner knows the password to the screentime feature, so if I try to unlock it outside of the rules I set, I have to ask her.

You are not going to change your behavior until you really understand how negatively it's affecting your life. For me, once I cut out basically all social media, all talk radio, all youtube, my ADD symptoms improved considerably. From my personal experience, this stuff seemed to just wreck my brain and motivation. It was so surprising personally how much better my life got when I just stopped fucking scrolling

animesh
I write a distraction log. I write things down on a physical notebook whatever is coming to my mind either as a list or just phrases. It helps immensely sometimes. Other times I just give in to the distraction.
AccountAccount1
I also do this, and it's surprisingly effective (or at least somewhat effective that everyone should at least try, even a %10 reduce in time wasted is huge.)

The way I do it is I have CODE open, with a today.md and every time a thought comes up when I'm either working or learning I just go to that document and I write it down (as a sort of IOU to pay later) while the desire to check that is strong at that very moment, when I come back to that document after ~2hours, it's something so trivial, that I end up mostly not even look at it.

waterfallr
The book “make time” has many techniques