Comment by michael_nielsen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by michael_nielsen | Hacker News Reader

michael_nielsen

A very closely related idea is that most people have a "ground state": an activity that they naturally gravitate toward when nothing else intervenes.

For many people, their ground state is shopping, or talking with friends, or watching tv. Nothing wrong with any of these.

For some people, their ground state is aimless coding, or writing, or drifting around some community (e.g., the community of actors, or musicians, etc). Again, nothing wrong with any of these, and they may be a useful way of learning, or having ideas.

But for a very small number of people their ground state is much more focused. I've known people whose ground state is writing papers about physics or mathematics. And it's simply unbelievable what such people can get done in a year. (Note, mind you, that very few professional physicists or mathematicians fall into this category.)

I haven't founded or worked at a startup. My observation-from-the-outside is that founders often have to take on many different tasks. And I wonder how difficult that must make it for any of them to become a ground state task.

These days, the ground state of most people is aimless browsing, Facebook and Twitter.

Unfortunately,I am becoming most people and that has to stop now.

I challenge you to follow up on it. Block them.

Let me give you some anecdotal background story...

I realized this was happening to me a few months ago - that I was wasting more and more time just surfing Facebook or Twitter and so forth. So I started adding websites to my /etc/hosts file. (That is, my computer now blocks me from accessing these websites, unless I edit a file, and then restart).

It started with Reddit - one day I read an article on Reddit that said something along the lines of "How many of you are intelligent, but waste a ton of time on the Internet?". It struck me that I was one of those people - that my potential was dwindling away because I was wasting tons of time on Reddit rather than getting interesting things done.

I blocked Reddit a bit later, figuring I might unblock it given time, but I never have. After the first day or two, the instinct to open up a Reddit tab just died. I still feel an attachment to the community, and I feel kind of bad that I left, but I don't feel that I was addicted like people get addicted to drugs or so forth.

Later on, I blocked some other sites that I frequent, including Facebook. I even blocked HN for a while, but I realized that I wasn't wasting nearly as much time on here as the other sites, for some reason. Perhaps it's because the rate of change of articles is small. Plus, HN has noprocrast settings, which are great. Anyway, I digress. Sure, there are disadvantages, but the advantages, and the savings in time, are huge. I know a lot of people say they don't want to leave FB because they'll lose contact with people. 2 responses: One, my last FB status says to contact me on gmail - so if anyone really wants to get in touch with me, they know how. Two, it's only blocked on my computer, so if I really want to take the effort, I can hike over to a library computer or something and respond to people.

Now, the point to this comment is to convince you that you have to block these websites too.

There are two things that I would want to tell myself in order convince myself that I needed to go through with it.

1. The reason I didn't want to do it - and didn't do it, for a long time - is because I always thought that I should just have enough will power to stop doing it. If you believe this, remind yourself that even though you believe this to be true, you keep coming back to Facebook every few hours or days. Why is that? It's because even if you have enough willpower 90% or 98% of the time, that small fraction when you don't is enough to open a tab to FB, but once you open a tab, you could end up wasting an hour.

2. You become more aware of how you spend your time, and you become more productive, after you stop wasting it. I used to dump hours into just surfing the web. Now I'm quite sensitive to how much time I spend, which is advantageous. Plus, most of the sites that I visit (like HN) require constant focus, so you can't really get into that vaguely unfocused mindset that allows you to waste tons of time on things like Facebook.

In short - you said that it had to stop now. I challenge you to follow up on it :) Blocking FB, etc, was an awesome choice on my part. I think it will be for you as well.

A rather inspiring post. I'm currently editing my hosts file.

Thanks :) I'm glad I could make a difference. Maybe I should edit this into a blog post.

"edit a file, and then restart"

Our of curiosity, what operating system do you use? On Windows, hosts entries take effect immediately. No need to restart.

Ubuntu. I could be wrong though - I read it somewhere and never tested it out.

Wait, you restart your whole system anytime you edit /etc/hosts ?

I wrote an ad-hoc adblocker out of /etc/hosts files and shell scripts for Mac OS X. (The shell scripts just block and unblock--unblocking is necessary sometimes for a chess site I use which detects adblockers.) Usually restarting is overkill for a new hosts file to take effect--on Mac OS X `dscacheutil -flushcache` will reinstate a hosts file. Ubuntu must have a similar command.

I use the self control app on Mac OSX.

http://visitsteve.com/work/selfcontrol/

Don't block sites completely... Control the times you view sites! https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4476/ (No Affiliation but I love this thing)

Summary: LeechBlock is a simple productivity tool designed to block those time-wasting sites that can suck the life out of your working day. All you need to do is specify which sites to block and when to block them.

Do you know anything similar for Chrome? Firefox can't handle 50+ open tabs.

Chrome Nanny

Thanks.

StayFocusd rules.

Maybe 50+ open tabs is part of the problem!

Initially, I wanted to just temporarily block sites. But I found out after completely blocking them (just for a few days!) that the quality of my time had actually gone up dramatically. I guess your mileage may vary, though.

I spend more time browsing HN than any other site.. I guess this means byebye HN? :'(

I understand your jest, but it got me thinking...

I think I finally connect with reason why some people here defend the community so fiercely; It is so that time spent on HN is spent learning something useful. I have probably wasted lots of time here, yes, but I have also learned so darn much!

I just need to leave a few hours of the day open to actually implement what I've learned... which I do, thankfully.

If you stop finding HN useful, or you start coming here just to burn time or be entertained or to avoid work, and you really don't put any of the things you learn here to use... then, yes, its probably time to say byebye.

I understand your jest

I was only partially joking... I actually DO spend more time than I should on HN! You are right though - I do learn a lot from HN, but at the same time, I often browse just for the sake of it, or to procrastinate. So it goes both ways really.

If you stop finding HN useful, or you start coming here just to burn time or be entertained or to avoid work

Exactly.

and you really don't put any of the things you learn here to use

I hope that I do put the things I learn to good use! There is a lot of really useful information floating around here, I'd hate to spend all this time reading it without applying it. Most of the startup related information has yet to be applied, but I hope to soon. The programming related information does get good use though.

HN has noprocrast. The default 180 minutes is good for me.

Aaannd done.

For the past few months, whenever I got stuck on a problem, I almost instantly stopped thinking about it and switched to a reddit tab, instinctively. I do not know why I did that, but it certainly slowed me down. Perhaps I'll become super productive and finish my thesis in the next week (unlikely :D).

Ditto everything you said

I went a half-step further and setup my hosts file to point certain domains to a page that says JFDI (unabbreviated).

It gives me a nice reminder to go work on things that matter.

Or becoming enticed in extremely interesting articles on HN when there is billing to be done, or problems to work through...

Edit: This seemed really snarky when I reread it - I do want to state emphatically that I would REALLY miss HN. But I must confess that I have to give myself a mental shove to get back to work sometimes...

And back to the point of the article, I have to keep my eyes on the path _through_ the obstacles - I think the same thing. Like my grandmother's bumper sticker "Look for the good and praise it."

Or when your reading somewhat interesting articles on subjects that are well outside your current areas. As in I find myself occasionally reading things on Haskell or Scala or some other language despite not even knowing the basics of the language.

I like your idea... it makes me wonder if it's possible to change your own "ground state". It certainly seems like it would be an awesome lifehack if you could change it over time to suit your objectives.

I would say yes. But not in the sort of way most people would hope to. Meaning, you can't just pick any new ground state and change to it very easily. Instead, you must educate yourself in new areas and you'll find yourself being driven to new ground states that were impossible options before your new education. Now you are 'falling' back into something that is, more or less, the same concept... but far more powerful now that you've given yourself more tools.

For example, my ground state used to be browsing the web and aimlessly brainstorming business ideas when I was in high school. Seven years later I've thoroughly taught myself how to build concrete business models and virtually test/evaluate them with thought experiments and many other similar concepts. Now my ground state falls to that: effectively the same sort of ground state but amplified with skills and knowledge.

My ground state appears to have consisted for some time of sitting down and reading discussion boards. Somehow, over the last month, I seem to have replaced it with instead working on my music project. It wasn't really a conscious decision, but I found I started to engage the same pattern of either completing or losing initiative in whatever I was doing, pacing aimlessly for a brief period, then almost automatically starting up my recording software instead of a web browser.

Maybe it was just as simple as finding inspiration. I've become slightly obsessed with a couple of albums recently, and have been composing more in the past few weeks than I did in the last six months.

In my experience, yes. I shifted my ground-state from 90% video games to 33% video games + 66% coding.

It's helped a lot, but I would like to push it further.

All work and no play..

I code all day - well, so long as I'm not on HN :)

As long as you don't believe that coding is work, you can do so much of it. Just find a project or a problem that you really enjoy working on and hack on it.

I do a lot of non-work-related coding in addition to my work-related coding.

I do it because I enjoy it.

Nobody's going to pay me to (edit: because I'm not a tenured professor) make finite state machines, toy languages in LLVM, and roguelikes.

The problem with roguelikes is that while coding them is good practice, actually playing them is pretty much a pure waste of time. Which makes me wonder whether I can still justify coding them...

This can be said of any game. Whether or not something is a waste of time is determined by the user, not the creator of the game. If you like coding them, then code them and gain the experience of coding them.

i have found that if i want to be a designer, it takes a few weeks to get thinking about design, about noticing good design and bad design everywhere and the imitating it in my work. however, if i want to think about raising money, or engineering the same is also true.

so it may be possible for people to wear many hats, but maybe it's best if you only where one hat a month.

I'm more researcher than startup-type, but to me they are both about getting the 'preparation meets luck' kind of ideas where you feel like you've got a leg up on the rest of the pack. When that happens, it's all you want to think about - it's fun and exciting and hard work all at the same time. Without the combination of the idea and the preparation you don't get the self-catalyzing reaction to boost you to some new 'ground state'. You're back to watching WWII reruns on the history channel (for example).

For some people, their ground state is aimless coding, or writing, or drifting around some community (e.g., the community of actors, or musicians, etc).

Mine is reading. That's why I went to grad school in English, despite the plethora of articles on why doing so is a financially bad idea.

(Well, I went to grad school because I like to read and because I have a backup plan if it fails.)

My ground state is Hacker News. I'm not sure if that's a good or bad thing.

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