Ask HN: How do you maintain a good balance between a high and low-tech life? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you maintain a good balance between a high and low-tech life?

22 pointsdevmonk18 comments

I feel like I spend too much time online, because there are so many things around the house, etc. that I don't get done, and I cannot afford to pay someone to do (nor would I necessarily want to). At the same time, I feel like my lifestyle is very low tech compared to other developers (I'm just not as interested in technology or development in the same way), and I feel guilty about not doing my best to be better in my (current) profession. I feel like there is no such thing as a good balance for me between the two, as I would always feel guilty about one or the other.

Have you found a balance between your tech life and your life "outside of tech" (or offline, or whatever) that you are content with? If so, what is your balance? How did you come to it?

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You don't have to choose between high and low tech. Simply fully embrace both. Your problem of having a lot to do offline and feeling guilty about your progress in tech sounds more like you feel like you are "wasting time" or procrastinating on both fronts. Try this to start out small. Pick one task around your house that needs doing that is small and can be done in short order and go take care of it. Then pick one "real" high tech task such as looking into some new platform or language that can be done relatively easily and do it. From there, keep picking tasks or parts of tasks with the goal in mind to accomplish one thing each day. The Internet is only a problem when we use it to avoid doing other work we know we should be doing. However, it is just as easy to find offline distractions to substitute for the online ones. The most important thing is to take a long term perspective on what you are doing even as you work diligently on each sub-goal or minor task.

You might find that the book Getting Things Done has some helpful advice on effectively managing your time/efforts. Good luck!

tl;dr Embrace both high and low tech at the same time. Set yourself the goal of accomplishing at least one task of either type every day.

_"Pick one task around your house that needs doing that is small and can be done in short order and go take care of it."_

Doing the dishes is a good one. It doesn't take all that long, it gives you time to reflect as it rarely requires great attention, and, even in a dwelling that is habitually cluttered, a moderately clean kitchen will make it seem like you have accomplished something.

Doing the dishes/cleaning the kitchen is my number one low-tech way to feel better about myself and my surroundings. (With the added benefit that my wife greatly appreciates it, since she can relax and watch video clips on her iPhone.)

This is apropos for me because just yesterday I decided that it was time to bite the bullet and switch to Vim from TextMate. The resulting [temporary] decrease in productivity put me in a bad mood for most of the day, but then the rational part of my brain kicked in and I was wondering why should I feel guilty about making a long-term investment in productivity?

Now I don't want to project my own issues onto anybody else--the point is to think about why you feel guilty--but in my case I think I have guilt issues relating to geeking out going back to early childhood when my parents were really not very supportive of long computer hours doing who-knows-what. I realized that the need to be outwardly productive at all times is a form of extrinsic validation that I sometimes lean on too heavily.

Okay, so this is quite a bit different from your story, but I think some general advice is applicable here: just follow your passion and don't let guilt feed some sort of psychological negative feedback loop. If you feel guilty about something, make a conscious decision to either do something about it or decide not to, but don't let it eat away at you.

As for the low-tech thing, well just remember that a lot of developers waste a lot of time farting around with whatever new toys they can get their hands on. It doesn't necessarily make them better. You could live in a cabin, grow a garden and chop wood every day, and if you sat down and focused on the craft of programming for 8 hours a day you could still be a great programmer. In silicon valley in particular I feel that the value of downtime and cross-disciplanary idea pollination is underrated.

I don't really make any effort to not disappear from meatspace. It takes some effort to not run into my housemates and whoever else stops by to visit (though avoiding them is still well within reach).

As far as housework goes, I don't normally have difficulty getting my job done or doing some cleanup after housemates who don't get theirs done. Mostly, it helps to not let things build up too much. If there's a week's worth of dishes sitting by the sink, there's not much chance I'll get through them all at once (I'll usually stop once the drainer is full), but if I take an extra couple of minutes after each meal I won't produce such a buildup.

With regard to keeping up with professional development, I put too much time into school to feel guilty about not putting enough time into it. There is a lot of stuff out there that I think would be interesting to learn, but I am under some time pressure to get my thesis done, so most of it's going to have to wait. On the other hand, I (theoretically) have many years left to spend on learning it.

Maybe it helps that I don't typically feel like I'm doing these things purely because of obligations to others (except perhaps some components of my housework, but they're typically not much of a time sink).

Referring to real life and the human beings that are a part of it as "meatspace" indicate that you have, for the most part, disappeared from it.

As much as I can, I try not to compare my life to other people's, especially developers. I'm not sure how it will pan out for me, but I'll either be very successful, or get a well-paying and gratifying web development job. I'm ok with both options, so what should I care what other people think? Everyday I see headlines about exceptional people, exceptional technology, and exceptional stories of success. I'm almost positive the people behind all of those stories were at one point in your position. No need to worry. Of course it is impossible to never compare yourself to others, in fact it's often helpful, but if it ever starts to impact your life negatively, then you should really evaluate why that is and come to terms with it.

As a wise person once said: Discipline is doing what you don't want to do, when you don't want to do it. You should either gain more discipline, make yourself want to do things that need to be done, or set aside a time to do things you don't want to do.

Not to sound "rebellious" to the tech community, but simply going camping one time completely changed my outlook. I realized I felt the most accomplished and satisfied when I was nowhere near my work whatsoever. Good way to really take a complete step back from the tech world to reevaluate everything.

Give it a shot, go camping!

Yep - without wanting to sound all peace & love it doesn't hurt you to completely unplug every so often. Whenever I've taken a decent holiday where there's no net access (yes these places still do exist) it's done me the world of good.

If time seems to pass quickly while you surf the web, you're probably making a habit of wasting time.

Use technology as a tool without allowing it to interfere with your focus.

Easily said, not done. :-)

What are you doing online?

If you're neglecting real life because you're consumed by creating something, then I say embrace it! It's called the zone, where all of your focus is purely focused on a task. It's a great thing.

I understand the sentiment expressed here. One thing I've recently done to mediate this is purchase a Kindle: transferring my once isolated consumption of copious content to a social activity around friends and loved ones. Far from a distraction, I find the ability to converse over coffee adds to my understanding and meliorates my memory.

I have thus far resisted smart phones and the like as I find ubiquitous connectivity distracting.

This is maybe a little extreme, but I take classes in stone-age wilderness survival. There's something deeply primal about knowing skills that go back roughly a million years: what plants to eat, how to bang the rocks together and make fire without matches. It's a nice counterpoint to the high-tech stuff I do for a living, and it helps kick my right brain back into gear when I've been immersed in logic too long.

What you are looking at is a false understanding of reality. There is no two areas in the world, one marked "can only be solved by high-tech" and one marked "can only be solved by low tech". You can use high-tech to solve all kinds of problems.

In your current situation, get a Romba and stop feeling guilty. That does nobody any good.

I try to do a lot of stuff with my hands, it gets me out of this chair and in to the world, and it teaches me useful skills.

Over the years I've found that if I just do online stuff I find it hard to keep a sense of accomplishment, moving bits around on a harddisk somewhere does not seem to be enough all by itself (for me).

..as I would always feel guilty about one or the other..

From personal experience, I would say, get rid of that guilt. That was a consistent and big mental block earlier in my life and still is occasionally till I get rid of it. The moment I get rid of it, I feel free to move forward.

It could be hindering you also.

Read novels, on paper, outdoors.

Stop feeling guilty and utility maximize.

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