Self-Interruption and Distraction | Hacker News Reader

Self-Interruption and Distraction

nautil.us

201 pointsrbanffy34 comments

I recently stopped using all of my social media, inspired by Cal Newport's Deep Work, and this resonates deeply with me.

At risk of sounding like an out-of-touch baby boomer (I'm 18), I think the portrayed utility of staying connected with people, etc etc, isn't the utility that drives our social media usage anymore. For me at least, the only tangible thing it accomplished in the long run was disrupting my boredom. I found that most of the content I was consuming was the equivalent of reading a magazine in the bathroom; I probably don't give a shit about the contents, but some content (regardless of quality) is preferable to idle boredom.

I've found, after a few weeks of not using it at all, that the times during which I'm bored are more easily spent on things that I'd otherwise ~feel~ too busy for, even if I had the time to do them all along. It's not even that I fill my boredom with productivity; I, kinda abstractly, feel less busy now that I allow myself to idle. It's weirdly made life a lot less stressful even though browsing social media is technically zero-effort.

It's also inspired me to tune out all of the content that relied on a push model to reach me (unsubscribing from certain newsletters, barely any notifications enabled, etc). It gives me a feeling of control to be able to choose when to consume certain content instead of being made to by virtue of notification.

> I recently stopped using all of my social media...

Same here. And yet here we find ourselves on HN... :)

(In our defense, the signal to noise ratio is much better here.)

Haha yup, my excuse is that HN directs me to a lot of long-form content with tangible value instead of throwing shit at me that'd only serve the purpose of keeping me coming back.

But in a way that's worse, because the engaging content and discussion on HN makes it that much harder to put the phone down and get back to work.

At least with Facebook I know there's almost nothing of value and with the news it's almost always bad, so I'm otherwise not missing much.

That's fair, although I consider HN a value-add when I use it (once in the morning). You're right though; if it ends up being a habit to check randomly, it causes a lot of the same problems social media does.

I'm personally trying to fix the habit of constant checking of HN so that I don't miss out on the good stuff with a weekly email that I can review once a week. [1] Admittedly, breaking the habit of checking HN throughout the day is a bit harder to break than subscribing to the newsletter, but in theory it would be an excellent solution. :)

1. http://www.hackernewsletter.com

It's worth noting that Hacker News has an anti-procrastination feature: set the "noprocrast" option in your profile to "yes", and then it will time-limit your visits to "maxvisit" in minutes, and block you for the "minaway" period.

I don't know of any other site that does this. It's a very cool thing for Y Combinator to have done.

Fully agreed. Let's give credit where it's due--not only to the community but also to the moderators, who do a great job keeping conversations civil and on track!

I didn't disable my social media accounts, but I did disable all notifications except calls and texts and that has made a huge difference.

Those little red badges were so enticing, and I often found myself thinking "wait, why did I get my phone out again?" because instead of checking whatever email I had intended to check, I was now on facebook messenger or snapchat or some other bulls%!@.

I can also recommend "unfollowing" all (or most) friends.

Ah yeah that's a good idea. I unfollowed a fair few during last year's election cycle, could probably stand to lose a few more.

I agree with all of your points. I haven't gotten to quite quit social media, but I only check when I want to (too often). No notifications anywhere. Phone always on Do Not Disturb mode.

The reason I find it hard to quit quit, is that I get a lot of value from posting. Not passive reading, but active engagement. Comment here, write a tweet there, repost this or that ... it's had a measurable impact on my life.

Measurable on the level of "If I wasn't active on social media, I'd be living in Slovenia on a $15,000/year webdev salary instead of engineering in downtown San Francisco".

So yeah, it's hard to quit. But I try to spend as little time reading as possible.

Also, if you get on the right social networks (in the broadest sense), it can have the "open door" effect Hamming talks about in his famous essay.

> I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don't know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important.

http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html

I feel you, I still briefly log-in to post blog posts + music that I work on, and a significant majority of my professional network came from a select few Facebook communities that I was heavily involved in a few years ago.

So yeah I think you're spot on with the "active engagement" bit, a lot of value can be generated when it's used in that sense.

To be honest i count StackOverflow as social media.

I redirected Facebook's urls to localhost just in case I am even tempted (it pisses me off just being there so its kinda dangerous) and I somewhat focus my twitter on work/personal-work related news. Removed all notifications on everything except my own stuff.

This setup doesn't remove the anti-boredom fix pattern in my life but at least it isn't too far from the main thread so the context switch tax isn't too high.

I am convinced most of the +sides are deeply held coping mechanism triggering somewhere but the randomness of twitter and the comfy network of SO and HN are important to stay in touch with at least something.

I have friends who live from organic-farming and boy is it weird living in a world where computers, internet and all that chaos is easily null.

Ty for the book idea, might help to improve my devops ;)

The problem isn't with social media, it's with the business models of Facebook, Twitter, etc. Social media is a great way to keep in touch with people. What isn't great is the constant interruptive notifications, ads all over your feed, ceaseless exposure to brands and people and posts you don't want to see because all of this stuff is known to increase "stickiness" and thus deliver a larger section of your time to advertisers.

Even when the experience is literally driving the brains behind those eyeballs to depression.

What if instead someone had created a social graph protocol and put it out there as an open thing for anyone to use? Like TCP/IP, or HTTP, or email. Perhaps we wouldn't have these problems today.

But the VC model saw an opportunity, moved in with huge amounts of money, colonized the space as fast as they could, and now work hard to pull as much cash out of it as possible. Just like a factory that dumps sludge into the river, they'll be happy to dump sludge into your eyeballs until they get pushback from consumers, regulators, or both.

Mastodon, GNU Social et. al. don't have this problem.

I read a lot of dead tree books – it's easier on my eyes and after looking at screens all day I want a break. I also tend to find devices distracting, even if notifications are off and I'm reading something – the device itself is a habit trigger for distraction.

But I've noticed that sometimes it will take me longer to get through my stack of books from the library. I'm interested in them, but it made me wonder about my reading speed. There's compelling research that speed reading doesn't really work in the same way as reading at a pace that's comfortable for you – and anyway, I'm a somewhat fast reader.

So I started to wonder about the root cause of my slow reading, and having listened to an interview with Cal Newport recently – and having read a lot generally about distraction – I had a realization: it wasn't my reading speed that was slowing me down. It was self interruption.

Last night I tried some of the basic techniques used in mindfulness meditation – being aware when my mind was wandering, acknowledging the random thought, and gently bringing my attention back to what I was reading. It felt like a form of exercise. Meditation after all is considered a 'practice'.

It made me realize that there are ways to start clawing back the capacity for deeper concentration that has been scrambled by the constant notifications and dopamine rewards of social media, and for me, reading is one of them.

Oh, and I burned through three chapters in relatively short time.

I have had the same feeling. I have noticed that my reading has slowed, and I really struggle to get through "long form" reading these days. I really do think the biggest influences in this are the tldr; aspect of the internet and self-interruption. Thanks for the mindfulness meditation mention, I'll try it out.

* also, what other things have you been reading about distraction besides Cal Newport?

A few off the top of my head:

A book I often recommend is "The Organized Mind", by Dan Levitin. He focuses heavily on the prefrontal cortex – executive function, etc. But the takeaway for me was his analysis of how much it 'costs' the brain to context switch.

"Flow" by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is considered a classic on the subject.

An interview that's been on my mind recently is this one from 2013 on multitasking with Stanford Psychology professor Clifford Nass: http://www.npr.org/2013/05/10/182861382/the-myth-of-multitas...

I am using very similar techniques on my hour long bus ride to work and back. An extra benefit to commuting with public transit, if you ask me.

I got so sick of checking the same apps on my phone over and over when I got bored during the ride. Really felt like I was doing my brain a disservice.

I've finished a book or more each month. If my reading slows to a halt, I stop, watch the passengers or look outside the window, and acknowledge my thoughts. Depending on how much is on my mind, it can take a while to begin reading quickly. Some days, I don't read quickly at all. Other days, I don't want to stop reading when I finally have to leave the bus lol.

Because I've been doing this every day for about a month, my habits are leaking into other free time I have in the evenings and weekends. I feel way more aware of when I'm browsing the net for quick bursts of dopamine vs. when I'm actually seeking knowledge and/or conversation.

I've started to acknowledge random thoughts by keeping an idea/thoughts doc. I write down my thought in the doc and tell myself I can come back to it later if I still care about it. I rarely open the doc otherwise.

So far it has helped me stay focused on what I'm working on.

I used to (ok, still do but I'm doing better) fill my browser bar with tabs I was planning on "getting to". Now, I have a bookmarks folder I can put them in with the same thought, I can come back to it later if I still care about it. Same as you, I really don't.

I have a curious thing: When I can't concentrate distractions sometimes help me.

For example I watch twitch (I find it kinda booring, which is good) when I can't concentrate on work. It helps me getting started, stick to the more booring repetetive work and when a chellange arises, I just loose track of the twitch stream completely and focus on work.

Now here my theory: I can't focus if something is too boring (e.g. waiting for compile times or doing something repetetive). I need to stimulate my brain enough not to drift off, but light enough so I can still focus on demand.

This theory goes will together with my habit to listen to podcasts at 2x speed. Lower and my mind wanders off and I miss whole passages and have to skip back.

It even kinda forms a hierarchy:

- reading difficult texts: absolute silence

- writing: music only

- programing: twitch

Interruptions from outside though are always horrible. My phone is usually completely silent (not even vibrations) and I hate people for calling when they could have used async communication.

I do similar. To not get distracted from coding when it's compiling I often go to keybr.com and do typing practice to prevent myself from doing something else more engaging and forgetting that I have a compilation to check in on.

This article is 100% me, but with an important caveat: I've always been this way.

I've simply never been able to focus very well on tasks for an extended amount of time. Occasionally I'm able to really dig in and work on a project for hours on end, but that's a once-every-few-months kind of thing. Working on technology infrastructure means that it's an endless pile of interruptions and emergencies and fires and urgent requests and so on. I don't think it's a good way of working; on the other hand it probably suits my brain pretty well. It makes it hard to implement truly complicated solutions, but often I find that's not what the requests are about anyway.

I wish I was able to focus better; on the other hand, my job won't let me do that anyway.

I don't disagree with the overall thrust of the piece, but the information about the F-shaped reading and four-second page switch doesn't imply, I don't think, what the author thinks it does. Typically people are sifting through tons of search results to find what they are looking for and exhaustively poring over each source before moving on wouldn't make a lot of sense. Not really the same as being distracted.

I think what the author (and most of the piece in general) is implying is that because this is the way these interactions with technology occur, it is forcing us to be less focused overall.

I agree I seem to have a smaller attention span for certain things. But, there are other contributing factors. If I want to tune out of everything I usually do this in the car while I am driving and put some music on. The reason while I work I have a shorter attention span is usually when I am stuck on a task. By distracting myself I can get back to the task relatively quickly. Also, working in my department and helping others is a contributor. On the other hand if I have a firm grasp of what to do and I am sufficiently motivated I can get in the Zone and focus. I agree with the article that our attention spans are shorter due to the over stimulation that society has created through new technology. On the other hand the tasks that we do have also increased in complexity so I think its a yin and yang thing. Due to the fact we have been steadily increasing worker productivity we have created ways to overstimulate ourselves to keep up with that productivity.

If you are interested in this, consider reading 'The Shallows' by Nicholas Carr. Ironically, I have become a worse reader due to distraction, so the book took me about a year to finish - but I definitely recommend it! You will come away from it vowing to quit Facebook/HN/The Internet.

> You will come away from it vowing to quit Facebook/HN/The Internet.

Then why are you here? :)

Oh, well the feeling fades... but for a short while it's quite compelling!

Damn I couldn't even read the article without: 1. Googling something that came to my mind 2. Going to reply to my friend on facebook (later completely forgot why I went to facebook and kept scrolling) 3. Checking Hacker News comments 4. Writing a comment

Shouldn't the title be "Why Our Attention-s- Spans Are Short?"

Short attention span on the author's side? ;-)

It seems the submitter changed the title, against HN policies.

I think "Shot" meaning spent, ruined, etc.

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