Disconnect. Offline only

I take advantage of the cognitive friction induced by the fact that you have to pay (even though it's cheap); I don't think I've ever used WiFi on a plane. It's nice to have some time with (almost) enforced lack of connectivity. I also never get Internet when traveling, including on an extended backpacking trip when WiFi was hard to come by. It makes it more inconvenient, but it's more than worth the ability to be fully present while exploring new places.

To think a little further forward, doing this tends to increase the time until the next novelty, so you get practiced in not constantly seeking immediate gratification. It helps increase your ability to be patient and to concentrate, which in part is the ability to not switch tasks at the first hint of boredom.

I agree with this but would emphasize that this is just an exercise to get free from a distracted state in your mind all the time.

Some people want to encourage disconnecting yourself from external stimulus, and just enjoying your own thoughts, and use the word "boredom" to describe this. Whereas other people feel that "boredom" means the frustrating state of being entirely unengaged.

I sometimes wonder if people who don't disconnect very often haven't experienced much of the latter kind of boredom, and so aren't as aware of it as a negative thing.

Thanks!

Sadly, most self-help book are like this. :-(

You can't just take word of mouth and automate it and productize it somehow. That kills its nature.

My feeling is that we are seeing today a similar appropriation, not of source code (most people who use computers at this point now see them as appliances, and wouldn't have any use for source code), but of the ability to embed externally imposed media within (and subservient to) our own private scheme of organization. Let me explain: in the old days, when you subscribed to a magazine, you admittedly would be forced to navigate it so long as you read it, but you would be free to place it and store it anywhere you like in your house, and even cut clippings out from it and rearrange them as you may. But computers are not just appliances when used as such, but instead become giant magazines which overtake the role of your entire house and mind.

We really don't have the equivalent capability to organize things as we please in smartphones, and people are using such capability less and less in desktops (and not at all so long as they only use the PC as a glorified web browser). Ted Nelson thought about the kind of organizational tools the user would need to have at his/her hands, and John McCarthy wrote about it a bit too (e.g., look for discussion here on HN in other threads about his paper, "The Home Information Terminal: A 1970 View", in which he points out that because people will control what they see, online advertising, for example, wouldn't even be possible).

As with other systems of control, my feeling is that you're not going to peacefully overthrow it so long as a large enough segment of the population is in fact perfectly happy with it, or at least unaware of any reason not to be. John McCarthy admitted this much when he conceded that most Americans are TV watchers anyway and won't need a home information terminal to do research, and Neil Postman wrote about the negative effects of television in his 1984 book, "Amusing Ourselves to Death".

Sure, if I'm stuck with a particular error message, a google search is often the quickest way to resolve. And yes, if you have to add a library that you don't currently have, you're out of luck until next time you're connected. But I've definitely found some of my most productive time while disconnected.

There are two issues-- smearing your computer's dev environment across the internet, and making the internet a hard dependency of your mental model for your project.

Downloading all the libs-- environment smearing problem.

Can't debug without SO-- internet dependency problem.

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/cover_story...

A book that has personally helped me is Kick the Drink....Easily! The idea is that there is no such thing as will power. The more you fight it, the more the psychological crutches grow, and then its difficult to jump off.

What the upper thread mentions is very true for porn addicts. They do this all the time. Program the router to shut off at certain times. Does it work? I doubt it.

Distraction is a very real thing. Hell, distraction is recommended as an aid for anxiety disorder :)

Get distracted, be human. Get back to work.

But how often does this happen, and how often, instead, does a smartphone distract from better tasks? How often I choose not to pick a book when leaving, because I've got the smartphone "just in case" ? Of course I have ebooks on it, but many times I waste time on facebook/HN/twitter/surfing. It's TOO EASY to get distracted.

   > Next step: "dumb" phone.
   > Next step: no phone.
   
   Next step: no nothing
   Next step: achieve zen

I didn't have a cell phone until the summer of 2011, and I only bought it because I was moving to another city. I've had a smartphone for less than one year (with the minimal amount of apps; basically whatsapp, telegram and very little more), and very reluctantly so.

In theory it's a nice idea to let go of the phone and move into a different style of social and personal life. In practice, this makes you the odd one who still refuses to use the medium everyone else uses (and right now, I'm the odd one who only looks at their phone 4 or 5 times a day, so people can't expect me to read a message within an hour of it being sent). The pressure to stay connected is very real even if it's not intentional, and this pisses me off.

A common answer to all of this is that if people refuse to contact you using other means, they are not really your friends. While I see the point, the sad truth is that by avoiding the most common means of communications, you're just putting hurdles between you and your friends, and mildly incentivizing them to stop talking to you.

At least I have successfully removed facebook from my life. That was far easier than I could have imagined, and I didn't even do it on purpose.

If you mean you want to see the DOM tree that has been generated with JS after you've loaded the page, you can see it in the corresponding tab in your browser's devtools. Eg in Chrome that's the "Elements" tab.

If you mean you want to know how the page works when you're offline, the information is again in the JS. You can use your browser's devtools to prettify it (both Chrome and FF have this feature) and search for "Do you want to be productive?" to see the code.

The Service Worker is only involved in that it returns the page and JS from its cache. It's the JS that detects whether it's offline or online and renders different content on the page accordingly. [1]

[1]: https://github.com/chrisbolin/react-detect-offline

I'm as guilty as everyone else here, admittedly. What's making me think seriously about something like this is that while I was on holiday recently and kept leaving my phone in my room, I had more random thoughts than I've had in a very, very long time.

I think you're misreading the comment (or at least not acknowledging the degrees of use that the author seemed to intend to convey).

There's "using a smartphone", in the sense of using one to respond to messages quickly, having an entertainment device on hand for idle moments, and generally "[being] plugged in 24/7".

Then there's "using a smartphone", in the sense of being able to borrow one for a specific use, then giving it back to the owner. The difference in usage patterns us the distinction that was being made.

And it's not like I'm a Luddite. I still consume my news and watch some HBO Now on my laptop, but I set boundaries. Relationships, life-long learning, and hobbies are all very important to me, and I see technology as something that has the strong potential to compete with these things.

Cron job mostly serves to remind me to use internet as a tool, not as something that is constantly on. Building this awareness of how I am using it is immensely helpful.