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Comment by fma | Hacker News Reader

With smartphones being ubiquitous, and we all have a few minutes here and there to spare...we just need to come up with a better and productive way to kill those time where you are idle. Any suggestions? Right now I'm waiting on my wife to get ready before we head out and spending it here on HN, but still, it's not productive.

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Meditation and mindfulness can be used as a direct replacement for smartphone usage to kill time, in all such situations.

Seriously, this is a very good thing to do. All those annoying meditator-commenters on the Internet are right.

https://www.mindful.org/meditation/mindfulness-getting-start...

...but my most common smartphone time killer is reading long-form articles I've emailed to myself.

Maybe I missed the bulletpoint when I was born that said “you shall be productive every single second of your existence”

Procrastination is a healthy part of live! Whether you do that on Facebook, poking your nose or playing chess...it’s all fair game!

I am reminded of an old zen saying:

"Sitting quietly, doing nothing, spring comes, and grass grows by itself."

We seriously underestimate the importance of boredom. I used to be like OP,constantly seeking stimulation/engagement with either books/mobile when bored but reading this https://hbr.org/2010/06/why-i-returned-my-ipad has deeply impacted me. While commuting, waiting in queue etc. I just let my thoughts wander and wonder at its nimbleness. Thank you for the quote.

What is wrong with being idle? Why has everything have to be productive?

This. I think we should appreciate some idle time occasionally. But my brain is currently wired for maximizing time on computer, doing programming or relwted tasks.

Idle time is good. I have close to a one hour commute, each way. Just me in my car. I dont rush or drive aggressively so my mind can be relaxed. My mind can wander, be idle. Most of the time the radio is not on, or just serves as background noise. Interesting to find the replies in this thread that assumes I'm always trying to do something, when already 2 hours a day I am not.

I wasnt assuming anything. I was giving an example from myself. Even when i drive my brain occasionally thinks about work, side project or some idea that i should definitely try.

Vacations are very boring for this reason, for me. It is not my thing to do nothing that challenges me in some way. Sitting at beach talking arbitrary things is not me, for example.

Get ebooks and read.

[edit] sorry for being curt, but seriously: that can be all there is to it. It changed the way I use my phone.

Nah, I didn't think you were curt. This was my solution for a while. Problem is when I read I hate to stop mid sentence or paragraph. While if on FB, or HN I can close without a care. I may need to take up less serious reading material I guess, hah. I will probably go back to this, though.

Any books you can recommend that helps fill those few minutes of void?

For light reading, I recommend:

Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About, by Mil Millington: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Things-Girlfriend-Have-Argued-About...

and form the acting world (but these are totally great to read on their own) I can recommend:

Awkward Conversations With Animals I've Fucked by Rob Hayes: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Awkward-Conversations-Animals-Fucke...

and The Truth, by Florian Zeller: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Truth-Florian-Zeller-ebook/dp/B01CV... (side splitting performance in London two years ago)

and if you're into it: http://www.hpmor.com/ . A bit fringe, but worth a shot if you've read the original books.

All of these are lighthearted and fun.

Aphorisms are good for that! I don't have a phone, but e.g. I've been reading The Art of Worldly Wisdom (17th C Spanish book) as a toilet book for a year or more, it's wonderful. I have a tiny book version, maybe 6x4x1cm. It's all in little sections of a half-dozen lines, great for reading 20 seconds or a couple of minutes at a time. An e-version would be great too I guess. So much wisdom in that book.

Also other aphorists - La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyere, Lichtenberg etc. La Rochefoucauld is savagely dark and funny about you (yes, you); La Bruyere similar but sunnier, fairer; Lichtenberg's kind of like an 18th C hacker writing - a scientist/mathematician writing his little thoughts about everything.

Almost all of Nietzsche's writing is in aphorisms or short paragraphs, he'd be great for that. I find him endlessly fascinating on a thousand subjects, and very funny too.

Thanks. I just got the art of worldly wisdom. Had $2 of Amazon digital credits to spend and the Kindle version is $2 :)

Another option is reading web comics or manga. For me those tend to be easier to consume during shorter periods of time than ebooks.

When I'm reading I like being able to sit down and really get into it.

I'll usually end up on Hacker News if there's nothing on my queue, though. But HN is largely content focused.

Think, or meditate, or simply zone out. When I give myself the time to do this I end up more productive overall.

The problem isn’t just online. There’s so much noise (both visual and auditory) these days that you don’t really have time to simply muse outside your home (if there).

Except this "productivity" you speak of is not productive.

So it's a false dichotomy between feeling like you are doing something and not "doing something". It's like buying a gym membership and saying you're fit now.

I guess I should rephrase what I tried to say. If I have 2 minutes to kill, what is better than browsing Facebook or Hacker News.

Just sit there and wait.

It's becoming a lost skill.

The extra time I have is usually 15 or so minutes before starting at work. Sometimes more than that, depending on how smooth traffic was getting to work. What I've been doing lately is to do programming. On my phone.

I have a secret gist at Github. Enable desktop mode. Resize the screen just right. It allows me to get a little bit done here and there, and it helps that what I'm working on is pretty simple. Update the gist when I'm done. Later, at home, I can pull the gist, fix it up, make it work, and recommit.

It's painful though. My phone's software keyboard is horrible for doing development work. But it works.

Flash cards. I’m learning my music notation.

Unless you can just chill, then chill.

I try to trigger myself to do a quick session on learning a foreign language. It’s not easy at first, but apps like Memrise, Duolingo or Drops support such short sessions.

Install a chess app?

Can recommend Lichess [1], the puzzles are a lot of fun! I can also recommend Wordfeud (a Scrabble clone), and Duolingo (an interactive language-learning tool by professor Luis von Ahn (creator of reCAPTCHA)). But I can also recommend mindfulness, or listening to music which makes you relaxed such as classical or ambient music.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lichess

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duolingo

Self-plug: I built a 5 minute word game for this very reason (diffuse mind time) that fits right in with your list of options.

www.esoterica.io

That's cool, just didn't know how to confirm at start.

Reminds me of a game by Microsoft. I really like Wordament. What I like about it, is that if you select the same language, you get the same puzzle. So you can play against a friend who's sitting in the same room! Who'd have thought I'd love a game by Microsoft (for Android!). Only annoying this is the ads; I wish I could buy a premium version.

Will check out Wordement. I definitely plan on incorporating heads up mode, as I love the competitiveness of blitz on lichess and similar. But it introduces a whole new level of engineering challenges, so first building out solo mode.

Cool game!

Is there a chance to get longer words in the mix? I could be blind, but the longest word I was able to spot was 5 letters long, I think.

Thanks! Sure are. Words currently go up to 7 letters long... I will probably increase to 10 soon, so long as that size dictionary doesn’t impact performance.

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