Hacker News Reader

Comment by wickoff | Hacker News Reader

I've blocked Reddit and HN on my desktop, now I am watching more YouTube, drink 3 times as much coffee and tea and am hyperaware of what's going on outside of my window.

Seems that specific websites aren't the cause, the problem is much deep than that.

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This is exactly what happens to me. If I do work that I enjoy, I don't procrastinate. I don't even mind doing the shitty stuff if most of the work is fun, but when I'm not enjoying the majority of my work, I procrastinate... Which is what I'm doing right now.

If the problem is "I can't bring myself to focus on this task", the mediums used to distract yourself are irrelevant.

Agreed, but if that is the root problem, is there a solution?

Discipline is the first answer that comes to mind... but say it out loud and... yeah, it's a non-answer.

The solution is to push back on whoever assigned the task to you and what the value of it is, what the end result should look like, etc. If it's worthless effort and busy work, make them understand it. If it's just the boring drudge that makes the better things happen, at least you can be engaged in the end goal.

I've gotten rid of ever using hacker news from browsers, and now I'm typing in a vim buffer from w3m to reply to you. At least I'm not leaving my development environment...

YouTube was tricky for me too. Because so many tutorials are on youtube it’s hard to ban it. And you watch one it’s no longer blocked at least on that tab. Get “distract free tube” or something like that on chrome/Firefox. It gets rid of the side bar, trending, suggestions etc. basically everything but the video.

It doesn’t solve the deeper problem but it turns a time suck website into a productive one.

I have that too. I have a small suggestion. It doesn't solve the problem, but it makes it slightly more bearable.

Find the least damaging form of procrastination and use that. For me these are:

1. Reading fiction books (currently reading "The Humans")

2. Exercise

3. Hacker News

In that order (I'm protecting myself against YouTube which is way worse than HN).

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