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by rottencupcakes 6178 days ago
I've been thinking about doing something like this for weeks.

It seems like at the start of my day I'll log onto Hacker News and read 5 or 6 interesting articles. However, without even trying, by the end of the day, all the links will be grey instead of black. I'll end up clicking on every link, even the links I really don't give a shit about. It's a time sink - it really is like surfing channels without feeling as guilty about it.

However, I wouldn't want to quit, I'd really want to limit myself. I'm not sure how to approach that though. Maybe an hour a day or reading random articles? How can I count that? Maybe a firefox extension.

But then how do I seperate searching for random articles from searching for solutions to problems when I'm coding or doing real work? How do I seperate those two things? I think part of what makes the internet so easy to kill time on is that it blurs the distinction.

If anyone can come up with a good plan or strategy to prevent time and life from being sucked away by the dark corners and alleys of the internet, while still allowing me to use it for interesting and productive work, please let me know. I think it would be helpful for all of us.

1 comments

Have you discovered the 'noprocast' setting yet ? It's in your profile.
noprocast is great, only problem is I usually open about 40-60 tabs at the start of the day... can still easily waste 2-3 hours. Some self-control is badly needed.
I just enabled that.

It is utterly PATHETIC that I need to limit myself so. However .. humans are weak. You have to trick yourself.

I was thinking of writing a daemon to rewrite HN's IP before I found out about noprocrast ... good feature.

I am very guilty of this myself.

A bit of a story, not sure if it is to my advantage but with all the honesty going around here (see darkxanthos) I might as well.

I'm stuck in one of the worst inspirational gaps I've been in for a long long time, and I'm trying to find the 'holy grail', a self-regulating community.

I realize that HN is to some extent set up to achieve exactly that, but given the number of people complaining about the neigbourhood going to pot it seems that there is some room for improvement.

So I find myself reading HN more than I probably should, but I hope it will jolt me out of my 'writers block' into a more productive phase.

Whatever the outcome I certainly learn a lot from hanging out here!