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Comment by hoodoof | Hacker News Reader

I check websites obsessively, over and over. Same sites.

I'm really wasting my life.

Toying with getting a dumbphone... I think I owe that to my kids.

You don’t need a dumbphone. You just need to make the phone you have dumb. I did this two weeks ago and it’s working for me:

1. Take Safari and the App Store off your phone. If you have an iPhone, you can do that with Restrictions.

2. Move everything off your home screen. Minimise the icons on your Dock. (Mine has Messages and OmniFocus.)

3. This sounds crazy, and probably isn’t necessary, but to make your phone boring - make it greyscale! Accessibility, Display Accommodations, Colour Filters.

I look at my phone waaaaay less than I used to because it simply doesn’t do anything. It should go without saying that Twitter isn’t on there. I don’t use Facebook.

My leisure time device - the one I’m on now - is my iPad. It’s a conscious choice to use this device; when I pick it up, I know I’m “just browsing crap”.

I use grayscale when I'm finding I'm too distracted by all the stuff on my phone or computer. It helps me focus on what I'm doing sometimes and is a visual reminder that, for whatever reason, I need to try harder than usual to avid distractions that day.

This has been a little trickier since I have started programming more. I really like syntax highlighting.

Another solution to this problem could be opening seperate users on the computer. One for serious work, one for leisure.

One could probably block facebook, hn, news sites, etc. on the work user, and only have files and programs related to work.

This is a fantastic idea. I'm going to try this tomorrow.

I really want switchable, individually suspendable workspaces as an OS feature. A workspace for each development project, one for each writing/research task, one for time-wasting browsing, one for gaming, and so on.

Not exactly what you're asking for... but Qubes domains achieve something like this: https://www.qubes-os.org/video-tours/

Actually KDE has had a similar feature for a while now. You can define "Activities" in KDE, when you switch between them all your settings and opened windows change.

For example you can define an Activity for each project, arrange your windows and settings (ie. desktop shortcuts, widgets, etc.), work on you project, then switch to a different activity. When you come back to your project, you'll continue from where you've left.

HN thread on an article that links to other articles about turning off syntax highlighting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11277183

Apt to push HN threads in an HN thread about ditching feeds

Wow, there is a lot of stuff there. About a year ago I looked for some contrast based syntax highlighting for Atom and didn't find anything usable, but maybe it's time to look again.

I've done something similar to this the past few weeks by basically turning my iPhone into a glorified iPod that has the added bonus of receiving phone calls. No Safari, no games, and the only custom app on there is my podcast player. There are less apps showing on the phone now than with a fresh install of iOS.

Moving most of the phone activities back to my computer or tablet makes it, like you said, a more conscious choice, and easier to not constantly check for updates.

Turning off all notifications has been nice. Instagram can't interrupt me anymore, only when I remember to check the app.

From this perspective the viral loop of social media appears greatly weakened once you turn off notifications, which is probably why instagram started sending me sms message on what I may have missed out in.

Yeah, the Facebook notifications situation is totally out of control - if they can't reach you by push notifications they'll send you ails and texts. I had to delete the app since there are some notifications it is actually impoaaible to turn off.

Discovering https://mbasic.facebook.com has restored my ability to use the little of Facebook on a mobile browser that I need without it entitling itself to further prominence on my attention span. Even keep it wrapped up in a separate web browser, that I go to only to check FB, works great for me.

I did this. I took all non iOS apps off of it, except my password manager. Even the useless iOS apps are gone, pages, and the like - I mean I would never use apps like that on a phone.

I use my iPhone to READ text messages and sometimes send them, to call people, and to take pictures.

That is it.

Unfortunately, I tried removing safari, but couldn't handle it because I needed to look up phone numbers or addresses when out.

I turned it gray scale (old school photographers captured images first and processed them a few days later)

I recommend doing all of the above!

Totally forgot about the greyscale trick, albeit for saving battery life.

The real world should be more engaging than my phone. Greyscale seems to kick my brain into kindle mode, a single use device.

I've been considering a leisure device after years of working to consolidate everything in my mbp. Leaning towards an iPad or a flip type Chromebook.

> This sounds crazy, and probably isn’t necessary, but to make your phone boring - make it greyscale!

On Samsung at least there is an all-in-one option: maximum power save. Disables most apps and notifications and makes the screen boring.

You can still call, open the calendar etc so the phone is very useful, just dull.

(For email addicts there's also the option of removing links to apps and I think you can remove even the shortcuts to built in apps.)

Good tips, but then why pay for a modern phone?

GPS + Maps is the killer app for me. The only reason for not switching to a dumbphone.

For record, I haven't had a physical phone for almost a year now and I'm 90% happier for it. Its that 10% of having a phone that's going to get me back in the system eventually, tho. GPS + Maps + Text&Email + Decent Camera + WebBrowser for info look up when needed, on the go. And that fact that my work demands 2-factor authentication to log in to access online employee services.

I run a Mattermost server to chat with family; so no 3rd party owns that data.

Ironically enough this came about as a cost-saving measure. I was considering getting the LTE Watch so that I didn’t have to take my phone as many places. No phone in pocket = no temptation.

That felt ludicrous, because it is, so I went with this option instead. FWIW I’m a total tech nerd - I grey-imported the first iPhone to Australia before it was even jailbroken - yet I have the iPhone SE. The form factor is great for me.

So, yeah, not buying the phone in the first place is perhaps the most sensible option. But I already had one, and so does everyone else.

(Also not being able to use Maps, not being able to re-enable Safari in a pinch, etc. - turns out having a smartphone is really convenient sometimes.)

I second the "separate device for leisure" policy. It has worked wonders for me.

You just rocked my world with that grayscale recommendation.

I had this problem. Solution was to install a Chrome extension called "StayFocusd" and really lock down what it allows me to look at. Only sites that are work related: mail, all the local web consoles (Jenkins) that I use, stackoverflow and friends, and websites containing "Cpp" or "python", and a few other keywords.

Wikipedia for entertainment. It's complex enough that it's like reading a school textbook: your mind gets tired from reading about the war of the Spanish succession, and decides to go back to work.

Everything else I give 3 minutes a day to, within the working day. So if I show up early or work late, I can browse a bit, but the 3 minutes can be used on random sites I need (say someone emails me some form I have to fill out).

I also use "TimeYourWeb" to show me what I looked at, and it's much better since I did this. Normally I didn't waste all day reading, but now and again I'd run into some interesting long-form article with associated links.

Now you might think 3 minutes is too little and I'd then cheat and go on Safari or my phone. Which I do, especially for Facebook. But I generally use FB to tell my friends I'm still alive by liking their articles. The articles linked from there are either things I've already read because they're all over the news that day, or not very interesting.

I also find the leap of having to copy-paste a link to Safari is enough to stop me doing it for most things, when I would have just clicked through on my main browser.

> I had this problem. Solution was to install a Chrome extension called "StayFocusd" and really lock down what it allows me to look at.

Good idea. I just did a search and found something similar, but with a twist, for Firefox: Forest. Seems to be trading addiction for gamification / reward of growing a virtual tree. :P

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/forest-stay-f...

I have used the app variant. It's kind of fun to see progress by planting bigger and bigger trees in a forest.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cc.forestapp

Adding sites to your hosts files also works well when using multiple browsers. Over time the path of least resistance grows and you stop checking. A simpler solution would likely be a dedicated leisure device, though.

I used to use StayFocusd too and wrote about it (along with other similar tools) at https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/how-to-overcome-procrastinati....

I stopped using it about 3 months ago because eventually you'll naturally want to avoid these problematic sites. I still check the usual sites but now it's much more controlled (a few minutes here and there per day with a 0% urge to go back to checking constantly).

Does anyone know of good solutions for this on Android?

Use an RSS client and curate your own feed.

Most of the problem lies in when we let someone else curate our feeds for us. Invariably they turn us into pigs slopping at a trough in the name of "engagement."

I uninstalled Facebook and started following a small number of websites via RSS. I became somewhat addicted to following my own feed, but it's got a better signal to noise ratio and since I curate it tightly it's not an infinite time waste -- there are only a few new items every time I check.

It's like replacing the potato chips you keep in your pantry with some mixed nuts. Sure there's still some fat in there, but no one designed your snack to trick your brain into endless consumption, next thing you know you've actually lost a couple pounds.

Facebook still gets maybe 15min of my time per day when I consciously choose to surf to it. More if I decide I want to post something. But I probably spend 500% less time checking feeds overall.

I've been looking for scholarly RSS feeds for a service I'm building (https://www.crossref.org/services/event-data/). Most sites still seem to have them. But a few are going facebook-only or twitter-only for feed syndication. It's a worrying hint that content providers are starting to forget about the DIY approach to feed consumption toward homogenised, gate-kept ones.

Contact those sources directly and tell them this. Direct feedback matters.

I'd also strongly recommend a fair bit of (even-handed) public commentary.

I've had fairly good results with this. A CBC programme ("Ideas" with Paul Kennedy) had blocked "commercial" podcast apps from using it. I groused, got a few Canadian news outlets to pick this up, and the feeds were restored after a few months. I'm working with the creator of the Online Etymology Dictionary over some recent site redesign, and that looks like it may be positive.

Not all sites are similarly responsive, and I've also ... on occasion ... been somewhat less than gentle in my criticisms (most especially with Google).

But really, do make the mention.

I've been doing the same, and wrote a small app that combines the feeds into a small daily email newsletter for myself. I wish I'd thought of this years ago.

The worst part about these feeds is they're infinite. Converting much of the same content into a digest that you can read in 30 minutes and be done with makes a world of difference.

Only ever having had a dumbphone I can tell you it might not be the complete solution: checking websites obsessively works just as well, if not better, on a computer (or similar, assuming you have one). Which I unfortunately know from both first-hand and second-hand experience. I'm no stranger to this behaviour, and I know at least one guy wo ditched his smartphone only to find himself to transfer the behaviour to his other computing devices. So you might find that, unless you really deal with that obsessiveness itself, your mind will always find a way to submit to it no matter what the medium is. Though obviously the smarthpone is #1 when it comes to enabling such pretty erratic behaviour.

How did you stop?

The trick is to tackle the issue, not try and sidestep it. When you quit smoking, removing stuff like lighters from view and access is a good thing to do, but it's not the hiding that makes you stop craving. You have to be hellbent on cracking down on the behaviour, take some perspective and discover why you're indulging in this, without pretence. It's a fight, sure, but it's also a journey at knowing yourself better.

I quite smoking just before Obama was elected. It was hard. I put up gruesome images of smoking-related diseases as my desktop backgrounds and screen-savers. It probably contributed some small amount to successfully kicking the habit.

Guess you could post pictures of smart phone zombies

A extreme minority of people are brave enough to do introspection and gather some self-awareness.

But I do agree, this is a large part of the solution.

He's on HN. That's like asking your coke dealer how he got off drugs...

That's like telling someone that drinks once every month or two that they have a drinking problem - nevermind the fact that they used to drink daily. There is a difference between doing the behavior and obsessively doing it or doing it too often.

I didn't really stop, in the sense that almost everyday I'll still visit a bunch of websites, possibly more than once, but I got rid of the obsessiveness: I don't check the same sites again and again every 30 minutes (or worse). I also won't turn on my pc just for it. I don't really know how I did it. Combination of recognizing my own behaviour, seeing it is total waste of time (it literally doesn't have any benefit whatsoever for me), figuring out it is actually a relatively simple addiction to break (especially compared to other addictions) and last but not least a saner state of mind in general in comparision with e.g. a couple of years ago. So one day I just told myself 'ok enough with this, from now on I'll just stop hitting F5 repeatedly, I'll visit HN and the others only a couple of times a day and never to escape hard to fix problems at work'. Am I still addicted? Possibly. Yes here I am posting on HN. But it's not an obsession anymore. Also there are never any signs of withdrawal when I don't visit the sites for days. Actually what typically happens is after some days without checking everything I come back, check everything, and am left with a 'yup, didn't miss a thing, same shit as usual' feeling.

Me too. It's an instinctive response for the physical symptoms of depression. The moment my hands are idle the feeling starts creeping back in until I'm having intrusive thoughts of suicide.

I understand well the existential problems that exacerbate my depression, like the sense of disconnection from society or that of loneliness, both temporarily relieved by scrolling through feeds and forums for various reasons.

It's an interesting phenomenon to be sure. When I am in my manic phase, I may go for weeks without talking to anyone online or rabidly consuming news or keeping a close eye on politics, but while phasing back into depression I will feel the compulsive urge to read news and talk about stuff online grow stronger and stronger. Like some sort of tic.

I deleted Facebook at the beginning of the year and it's helped my mood tremendously. I still get frightful bouts of loneliness and almost painful urges to talk to people when I'm feeling especially down, but I'm no longer self-medicating with the opiate that is social media and thus these feelings are compact and brief. I don't feel strung out on self-administered dopamine all day.

tl;dr delete facebook

An increasing urge is building to ditch as much tech as possible out of the home. Possibly all except the dumbphone, including the TV.

I cannot say it's built to the point of action, but there's some compelling arguments for doing so.

It's interesting that you say this. I'm watching the first season of Stranger Things just now, and am finding myself longing for my home of the early 1980s, without computers, just a radio and TV, and my bike.

I'm also finding that I'm reloading HN a few times a day (honestly close to 30) in the hope of forgetting that I'm alive while I find something else interesting to read.

It's 2017, and in the current sociopolitical milieu, it may be regarded as "abuse" to unilaterally remove television from the home against the wishes of your spouse and/or kids.

I would love to do this as well, as I harbor an abiding hatred for the passive entertainment industry in general. But it's often not worth the relationship cost.

Ask.

Then promise a alternative reward for a short time.

I have information addiction myself. I’ve had websites I check compulsively ever since slashdot first became popular. When it becomes a real problem I take action. I’ve only found two things to work: complete cold turkey with a specific end date (personal challenge) or subsituting site checking with activities I enjoy more (reading books, playing games, ...). I’ve never been able to subsitute with something more productive that I enjoyed less, I just end up procrastinating in other ways.

The remarkable thing about going cold turkey: you don’t miss out on anything important. Everything truly important will reach you another way. For me, checking news sites is not about getting useful information, it’s about rewarding my brain by feeding it what it has been trained to want. In my experience it took weeks to deprogram myself.

At one point I started listening to several news podcasts simultaneously...

News addiction is sort of a problem, especially because we often don't really drill down into the content, but just scan the lead, get the gist, peek at the comments, move on. But most daily news is provisional, and not well developed. Weekly or even monthly publications like Newsweek and the Economist may not be a model suited to the internet age, yet it seems a model that consumers desperately need to increase the SNR.

Time is your most scarce resource, and everything is competing for it.

In that light, it makes sense to purposefully pare down your environment to better align what you want to spend your time on, and what the objects around you tempt you to actually spend your time on.

I replaced having a laptop on my desk at home with a typewriter. Now when I sit at my desk, instead of spending an hour mindlessly browsing reddit like I used to, I write. My friends make fun of me, but I have written 10x more in the past month than any of them have.

I have used this approach with great success for other things I wished to prioritize more. For instance, I am purposefully not replacing my broken-screened-taped-up iPhone because I want to constantly be reminded that I probably shouldn’t be looking at it.

Remove everything from your environment (TV, video games, social media feeds, junk food, etc), and only add things back in deliberately. In the attention economy, being deliberate with your attention is the best thing you can do for yourself.

I've been struggling a lot with this lately. The thing is, there are a lot of digital things I _do_ want to accomplish / master / etc, but the feeds are the easier reach, and I go with what's at hand when I am low on energy (or worse, when I'm unhappy with my life).

I have an idea that putting some effort into making the things I _want_ to accomplish (e.g. another MOOC course) more readily accessible might make it easier to form a habit around consuming what I _want_, rather than mental candy.

tips for doing so:

https://heyfocus.com/ <-- Focus, lets you block sites. Start out just blocking everything from 9AM to 9PM

stay logged out of websites. Every time you want to use a site you should have to log in

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/history-autod... <-- this website will let you block things from your history. This prevents the "type n -> press down -> press enter to get to hacker news".

I'm typing this here so it's not 100% effective but I've found that after going sessions cold turkey I start to stop caring about the churn of news (especially for twitter).

Prune people you follow on social media. Especially high volume posts/low effort stuff. Not worth it.

I've found that using RSS feeds help a bit because you can only look at something once. No "purple link syndrome".

Good luck, I'm still struggling but I feel much more in control of my life compared to even 3 months ago after getting burned out like we all are. Especially from political twitter (just read the news on a normal website, it's fine to be 6 hours behind).

"type n -> press down -> press enter to get to hacker news".

It's even shorter as you can skip the "press down" step. At least in Chrome and Firefox.

I bought a Nokia 216 and cut myself off completely. I revived a long dead habit of manually checking my email once a day (and only once), in addition to that I was no longer permanently online on my various Instant Messengers.

I was at my worst when I had a Smartwatch, the damn thing bleeting at me, along with my phone, laptop and computer in succession was beyond irritating.

For two years, I had a dumb phone for when I was on the go and an Ipad I left at home for apps when I had the time to indulge. It was a good experience, I recommend it and I intend to do it again soon.

I had this problem for a while. The good old social loop of death.

A non-smartphone won't fix it.

I think fixing this problem begins with you asking yourself why you're doing this. Are you procrastinating over doing something else? Are you passing time because you don't have anything else to do? Etc..

blocking the site in /etc/hosts helped me a lot. I 've given up medium, reddit, all news sites. I add a site to /etc/hosts as soon as I feel like i am spending too much time on it.

Interesting comment about 'owing it my kids' , I always felt like I am whiling my life away because I don't have kids and hence don't feel like taking like seriously.

If I don't have kids, what am I striving for ?

Good question. A sense of accomplishment is a small pleasure, but it scales better than activities that provide high highs but inevitable low lows. Most people have an emotional equilibrium state; stresses and rewards can temporarily move the needle, but it tends to return to center regardless of the circumstance. Given that a lifetime of low-effort activity tends to limit opportunities for broadening your horizons and doesn't have a lasting contribution to happiness, a simple cost-benefit analysis indicates that dedication to personal growth is the best value for time spent. Ultimately, life only has the meaning you assign to it, so if you're optimizing for pleasure, learning and creative pursuits hold the most potential.

I have a large set of sites blocked at the router via dnsmasq, which scales well.

(It also means my unrooted mobile device ... doesn't have such protections when it's outside the Mothership.)

Say, could you say more about the exact pattern of how you do this?

I've noticed that I have a few "distraction" sites that I'll visit. And then when I hit the end, I'll loop back in hopes of another hit of novelty. What strikes me is how ingrained it is; if I'm not careful I'll find myself on, e.g., Facebook, with no conscious intent. I've even caught myself having a feeling of boredom with what I'm looking at and typing "facebook.com" in the address bar while I'm on Facebook. Is this familiar?

I ask because I'm thinking of building a WebExtension to notice and interrupt this cycle, so that I have to consciously want to use a distraction site. But I'm not sure how big the audience is.

This, me, all the time.

I would use such an extension.

I use news feed eradicator with Facebook. It has solved it for me.

If you're thinking this now, do something about it now. I'm two years from empty nesting and can't fix the things I didn't do. All I can do is say that you won't be able to either if you wait until it's too late.

Give us a list of things that we should stop doing today. I have a one year old.

2 simple tricks work for me:

1. Only use HN to consume "tech news" - loads fast, has no ads, content averages @good+. Then turn on noproc.

2. Set time of day u close laptop+phone+(enter any other device, fridge is excluded). For me it's 18:00.

Rather than a dumbphone, which doesn't support actually-useful things like managing my calendar, notes, grocery lists, etc. I picked up a 2.4" android phone, on the theory that it will be annoying to browse, type, etc so I will only use it for useful things and not leisure.

It seems to accomplish those goals, and as a kicker it has great battery life only when the screen is off... Just have to commit and port my number now. Sadly none of the tiny Android phones support Verizon.

Can you get away with carrying no phone? If you can, it is a weight lifted off my shoulders and might be the same for you. My time belongs to me. I'll see the missed call message and call you back when I have time.

It's hard to describe the feeling. It feels a bit like that time when I was finally caught and punished for doing something wrong, just a huge sense of relief.

I agree. Obviously in today's world it seems difficult to not carry a phone. But I used to do this in college and it was marvelously liberating. I'd recommend two stages:

1. Remove your phone from your person, but still keep it with you. I.e. if you carry a backpack/purse/whatever, put your phone in there rather than in one of your pant pockets.

2. For small tasks, leave your phone in your room. Obviously more difficult than the first item. In college when my friends and I would go to the servery to get dinner, I would leave my phone in my dorm room. This is truly immersive because it gives you no possibility of even wanting to use it when you are enjoying the time you are spending with the people physically present with you. (Again... clearly more difficult in our world today, but look for small opportunities; going to a coffee shop with a friend? Leave the phone in your car's glove compartment for that 20min coffee break.)

Delete your accounts. It's worth it.

Which sites lure you in?

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