Want More Time? Get Rid of the Easiest Way to Spend It | Hacker News Reader

Want More Time? Get Rid of the Easiest Way to Spend It

raptitude.com

85 pointsw23j44 comments

> It was around Day 9 that the most telling thing happened: Facebook noticed my absence ... I was being shown a new kind of notification: “Check out Jim’s comment on his photo” or “Jane commented on her status” as though someone else using Facebook is something I ought to be notified about. These contrived notifications were the “Emperor wears no clothes” moment for me. It became obvious then that Facebook knows its users have better things to do, and quietly hopes they don’t notice how little they get out of it.

Good observation, just saw this recently.

I hate those notifications.

I use Facebook pretty much exclusively as a way to discover and congratulate people on major life events (birthdays, weddings, babies, etc.). I use it maybe once a week, but I actually really do appreciate being notified about e.g. someone's birthday - it's a gentle reminder to catch up with that person.

The first time I got one of those generic "Jane commented on her status" notifications, I assumed something major had happened: Someone had passed away, had a major life change, etc. Of course, it wasn't that - it was something much more trivial.

The birthday notifications/etc. are useful enough that I keep the app on my phone, but the incredibly vague "so-and-so updated their status" notifications are pushing me towards finding alternatives.

Right? It ended up being a bigger decision because I like getting notifications when someone does something related to me but I can't stand getting those generic notifications about other people's activities with other people. So I blocked the notifications by revoking the app's notification permissions. Sucks but they did it to themselves.

I am really annoyed by services that do not let me control which events give me notifications, and how those notifications reach me (in app, push, email).

> but I actually really do appreciate being notified about e.g. someone's birthday - it's a gentle reminder to catch up with that person.

Just put their birthday in a calendar app. You'll be reminded every year, and you won't have to rely on Facebook. Best part is, their birthday doesn't change, so you only have to do it once!

Or even better, to their contact details in your phonebook, and get an app that reminds you of them. I now get notifications for the birthdays I care about, and can disregard Facebook reminding me about some vague acquaintancies.

I moved all of my friend's Facebook data into MonicaApp [1] [2] (open source friends crm, you can self-host if you want, I pay to support the dev). I get reminders for any events per-relationship, and there's a reminders API [3].

[1] https://www.monicahq.com/

[2] https://github.com/monicahq/monica/

[3] https://www.monicahq.com/api/reminders

Same here. And I had the exact same reaction. a.) Good, I have been gone long enough for them to take notice. b.) How sad is the state of current engagement. You have to resort to sending me emails about my 2 friends "Joe commented on Sara's wall" click here to see what he said. How sad. You could provide utility, instead, you choose to pimp me out for a click.

From a marketers standpoint its an easy sell. We increased users CTR and time on site, wahoo! From a business standpoint, there is a slow churn and dissatisfaction which erodes the value created until the user has a negative viewpoint and distrust of the service.

Why not go one step further and get rid of internet at home? I've been doing so since April and it's dramatically reduced my time spent on social media or watching TV/movies. Instead of binging TV I go out and do something.

Just curious - how do you manage bills/finances?

Maybe a mobile internet connection?

For me my mobile data bundle (10G) could last me for an entire month with all of my regular networking needs as long as I don't watch YT or Netflix. But since I do I also need a separate home connection.

> Maybe a mobile internet connection?

That’s kind of cheating though, isn’t it? Home internet vs mobile internet at home?

People were “doing bills” for centuries before the Internet came along. My guess is it’s totally possible!

The point is not to be without the Internet, the point is to have more time to spend on things you appreciate; "doing bills" offline takes more time than doing it online.

Rapidly becoming impossible. So many government services now are only available via online. They expect you to go to the library and do that.

That said, if I didn't work from home. I think I probably would outright dump my internet connection to regain freedom. Maybe I would go to the library with my laptop to do the bills. It would create a hard block for needlessly worrying about them.

While it is definitely possible where I live, it will take you at least ten times as long (because it just doesn't work very well and the process is not at all streamlined). Don't even get me started on taxes. Doing those without the internet is the metaphorical equivalent of stabbing your hands repeatedly.

I don’t advocate this approach, but it seems like an easy question: plug in the router, pay your bills, unplug the router—or just do it at work.

For me this sounds so radical it's hard to imagine. I'm sure at least half of my time home (aside sleeping) is spent in some Internet related activities.

Presumably because most people don't think that "going out and doing something" is inherently superior to "watching movies and TV".

Ditched Facebook on the phone ages ago and I had exactly the same experience. I now check FB from time to time on my desktop. Twitter might be up next but for some reason I don't find it nearly as addicting as I found Facebook.

The other big lifestyle change was trying to change how I engage in internet comments. I had a knee-jerk failure today but mostly I'm trying to be less breathless and cynical when I post online. Keeps me from spending all day rage-returning to some stupid flamewar that I either started or perpetuated.

> The other big lifestyle change was trying to change how I engage in internet comments.

When I find the urge to reply to some idiotic notion on the internet, I always think back to that XKCD comic (https://www.xkcd.com/386/) and tell my self I don't want to be that guy.

Ha ha that's a great XKCD- in fact I quote it to my wife when she wants me to do something and I can't quite yet because I have to set somebody straight....

I had removed the Fb from my phone before and reinstalled it at a later date. What kept it off my phone 'for good, so far' was that for a while I'd unfollow anyone who posted any utter garbage to my feed, with occasional strategic exceptions.

Now if I want to check Fb I'm only on it for a few minutes due to 1) Using mbasic.facebook.com and 2) Only checking the 'notifications' tab. There's very little else getting through to the News Feed anyway.

> There's very little else getting through to the News Feed anyway.

This. This whole "News Feed" idea, that the author touches on IG starting too, is just garbage. I want to see the most recent events first and scroll from there. You're not providing me any service by showing me random crap in any random order. All you're doing is giving yourself the ability to tailor what I see even more. Totally made Facebook worthless to me.

I used to scroll through it endlessly and since they started doing that shit I don't even bother anymore. I check notifications and close it, if I do anything.

I realized the same. My antidote was to remove the whole feed with uBlock Origin. Now Facebook is events and fallback messaging platform for me.

That's a really neat idea!

I wish a lot of companies hadn't decided to embrace Facebook as an identity provider. Sometimes that's the only way for me to log in to something. Can't even use normal username and password credentials. That's probably the only think keeping the app on my phone.

You don't need to have the app on your phone to use Facebook as an identity provider. I haven't had the app on my phone in over 4 years and the very few services that do require using them for authentication work just fine.

I know this is a Stallmanesque suggestion, but if Facebook is the only way to authenticate, odds are that I don't really need whatever is being offered to me.

Yes, they don't really deserve you as a user.

As good a time as any to quit HN I suppose.

I check Facebook at most once every 2 months. HN is my time sink. I should bite the bullet and quit, or maybe just check HN on weekends. This is the wrong place to ask but what the heck, anyone care to share their experience quitting HN?

This reminds me of all those subreddits of people asking how to quit reddit :). There's been periods where I don't check HN much at all for a few months, but I notice that when I "stop checking these specific time-sinks" that really just treats a symptom and I still waste a good amount of time, just on other sites. The only real way to quit is to be intentional about what, specifically, you want to fill the regained time with. I don't have any studies handy, so this may just be conjecture rather than actual science (as if anything else exists online), but it's often easier to make a "positive habit" such as reading 20 more minutes per day than a negative habit like "don't check HN".

I do have phases where I add HN to my /etc/hosts file, but randomly I come across useful insights on hacker news, so I haven't quite taken the step of quitting completely. But if I see an interesting article during a period where I should be working, I've taken to using pinboard's "read later" function and then binging articles all at once when I get to the point where I feel as though I'm not going to produce any more good work for the day. I'm sure pocket, papaly, raindrop.io and other bookmarking services probably have similar functions, though I haven't used them myself.

If the cold turkey route would be better for your use case, you can try the blocking techniques from this article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15309393

Thanks for the HN link. That will be the last HN article I read for this week :-).

>This is the wrong place to ask but what the heck, anyone care to share their experience quitting HN?

HN is the vaping to the cigarette smoking that is burning time on Reddit, for me anyway. "It's still got a lot of smart people posting thought-provoking content, and content relevant to my career, it's ok to spend time here", I console myself with.

Unfortunately I'm doing the equivalent of taking a drag from a cigarette followed by a puff of a vape now, having had a severe relapse on Reddit usage, despite internally despising the site and most of everything on it.

I've rendered my iPhone pretty inert at this point, in an effort to increase my own online-data privacy and reduce distractions created by the compulsion-driving behaviour programmed into the apps made available to us.

No notifications from anything but iMessage, phone calls and WhatsApp. Do Not Disturb on continually to filter anyone that is not in my contact list. Fb/Twitter/Reddit/etc. apps removed. Time in calendar set once per week to check updates on FB, Instagram & Twitter, timeboxed to an hour.

This has made daily life a lot more pleasant, I feel. However, behaviour on my desktop/laptop remains pretty unproductive once the workday is done. Still burning time every day glued to Reddit, particularly browsing the comments.

What is it with comment sections that have that particular draw? I don't even post on Reddit, but when it comes to the comments on the content there's a somewhat inert desire to not look away, and I know I'm not alone in that.

> { comments closed }

Second easiest way to spend it; good call.

For the desktop there are time-spent trackers like RescueTime, but for the iOS phone one trick I use is to look at battery percentage spent in various apps during last 24h and 7 days. Works best if you use dedicated apps to access obvious time-wasters like instagram or facebook, but you don't get a breakdown on mobile browser(s).

Same here. I decided a month ago to uninstall Facebook, twitter, reddit & co from my phone and I’ve been pretty relaxed since then. I’ve been trying to spread the word as well. I feel like it’s aking to being a vegetarian, you need to be annoying and tell the world about it. But seriously, you should try it too.

I’ve also disabled all notifications. Now every app is agressively telling me agressively to switch them back on. It’s insane (looking at you Messenger).

Man. This really feels like I could've written it. Really good article I feel exactly the same. I've done exactly the same as well and come to the same conclusion. The note about facebook noticing you're gone and sending weird notifications is really what did it for me. Facebook lost all notification privileges after that and I haven't heard from it since. It's kind of nice!

The only reason I'm addicted to my smartphone is because my work email is connected to it. I've fallen into this habit of checking my work email every few minutes to make sure there are no fires or when I'm in meetings. On weekends, when I consciously keep my phone away, I find myself less attached to the phone though it's more than I'd like it to be.

This is a confusing issue because there is a mix of newsfeed and friends, and "friends" on Facebook.

Do you consider time spent on twitter to be catching up on news, and thinking about the world, or a waste of time?

How about hacker news?

I thought most of us recognize that HN is a waste of time. That's why theres a no-procrastinate feature.

Most of the news I read here is unimportant, or doesn't affect me. Oh look, a framework. Oh wow, a company got funding.

Occasionally there's a neat article about our industry which makes me stop and think. And then I go into the comment section to have a healthy debate about it. But who am I kidding? I don't know anyone here. And nothing I say will likely change any minds. And vice versa.

At the end of the day, HN is mindless entertainment. Some days I'm restless and I can't just do nothing. But I need a break from work. So I spend 5 minutes on HN and go back to what I'm doing. Unless it's nice outside. Then I take a walk.

I am very surprised to hear this view.

Because what is a "waste"? Is spending time reading a good book a "waste"?

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