I Got My Attention Back (2017)

This is very cool! I’ve recently started using my wife’s old Kindle for reading the pfSense book and the Google SRE Handbook and have been loving the fact that it isn’t a bright screen or filled with distractions.

This is a great idea that I’ll be trying out with a couple technical blogs.

I love the idea, will have to try it out. Not so thrilled about yet another service that wants to collect a monthly rent, but maybe the free tier will suite my needs

This is something I never even considered but I love the idea of leaning more on my Kindle Paperwhite and less on my iPad. Going to give it a shot!

Love the service - I've just signed up to give it a go.

I also use the "send to kindle" chrome extension which takes the web page page you are looking at and sends it to your kindle.

I find it really useful for long reads I need to pay attention to and I like having a queue of them on my kindle.

This looks amazing - and for folks like me with a Kobo, it instantly lead me to https://github.com/koreader/koreader.

Amazing.

Don't apologize. Feel proud to have built something that people find so useful to bring your servers down. Good users know that you deserve a little patience.

How do you actually build the Kindle file with the articles?

I've tried a couple times to hack together something similar for personal use but I could never figure out how to create the newspaper file.

This looks terrific. It seems to be exactly the service I have been looking for. I too found myself easily distracted and addicted to my phone when browsing the news. To help combat my addiction, I wrote a script that'll parse my favorite news websites and email them to my Kindle. It's been "life transforming". I can now read my news addiction and distraction free. Plus, I have always preferred reading walls of text on an e-ink display, especially before going to bed. The only downside of my approach is that it takes a lot of time to write my scripts. Every website is different and some websites don't provide APIs. For example, the WSJ provides no APIs to consume their content even as a paying member. So I find myself resorting to selenium to do the parsing work for me. There are many other websites and blogs that I'd like to have sent to my kindle, but I dread the effort needing to do that. So I'd happily pay a small fee, such as your site, to have this work done for me.

I launched something similar in 2014 - a few years too early, I guess: https://betalist.com/startups/thedailycrunch

Good luck with your service :) officially supporting apps on the Kindle would open up a very interesting (if niche) market - I'd love to see "the slow web" become a thing.

It’s not a “quick fix” but meditation really does help build focus, attention, and awareness. If that sounds like it would be impossibly hard, you can definitely start small with something like 10 breaths where you really just pay attention to breathing in and out, and then gradually work up to longer stretches.

I find that meditation has a spillover effect into my life — I’m less likely to be tempted by junk food, let’s say, on the days where I meditate.

Here are some things that have worked for me:

1. Keep your phone on silent (or shut off) in a different room than your office (or wherever you're trying to work)

2. Install an app like Refine on your phone and block all social media and sites that you open up frequently (HN would possibly be an example)

3. Keep your phone in a different room before going to sleep.

4. If you like listening to audiobooks, consider getting an Amazon Echo. I like to listen to audiobooks before falling asleep and with the Echo you can set a sleep timer and then play an audiobook and it will stop playing after the sleep timer expires.

5. On your laptop (assuming you use Mac or Linux) add social media and other frequently visited non-productivity related sites to your /etc/hosts file.

Personally I try to avoid drugs for these kinds of things. In my view it's a matter of self improvement and self-discipline which are things that can be developed with effort.

Sounds like you’re aware of the problem, and already know what you want to do about it. Now time for that daunting next step, doing something about it.

Start with something small, take a walk outside every day. It sounds stupid but it is guaranteed time away from a computer and the barrier of entry is non-existent.

At the end of the day, nothing will change until you change it. Nobody will come fix it for you, it’s on you.

Hope this helps, you got this fellow person struggling with indefinite WFH :)

I am in the same boat.

I noticed that mindless browsing is a form of procrastination. The small trickle of dopamine from mindless browsing prevents me from starting more rewarding activities.

I learned two things: don't use your computer without a purpose, and turn it off when your task is done.

Computers make you fine with being bored. I found that just shutting the computer off and doing nothing for a few minutes is enough to spur me into action. The first step is to catch yourself browsing mindlessly, and stepping away from the computer.

Sometimes, I'll get busy with other things and spend days away from the computer. I'm always surprised by how few messages and notifications I missed.

I’d recommend searching for an addiction therapist. Most will revolve around alcoholism, but there are many that specialize in more general forms of addiction.

1) Even very minor changes, like leaving electronics in a different room, help.

2) The best website blocker for me isn't one that that blocks me from Facebook/reddit/etc for a week -- I just start to rebel against it and eventually uninstall. The one I use is called "Focus" and blocks me out for 20 minutes. Enough to get work done, but also not enough for me to start resenting it.

3) I figured out that I could actually read books again if I biked to the park without my cell phone and read in a hammock. To get internet again, I have to bike all the way home and I'm too lazy for that. It worked great until it reached 1000 degrees in Texas -- maybe you're in cooler climes.

We use digital devices for distraction from our anxieties when what we need is calm. I recommend something compelling, work-related, and thoroughly analog: get a really nice engineering notebook and give yourself permission to write all over it. Close the lid of the laptop when you do this, and put the phone aside. Write one paragraph that describes the problem you're working on, or draw a diagram. Allot ten minutes to this. You can afford to go dark for ten minutes. No one will notice. Pay close attention to the physical act of creation. This focus on a single thing is a gift you give yourself; turn to it selfishly. It feels like you're slacking off, to ignore the screens and do just one thing, to doodle in a notebook instead of being available on chat. Indulge yourself in this and banish the feelings of guilt that come from tuning out all of the people who need your attention. All of them can wait ten minutes.

I find this practice is easier to engage in than meditation, but it brings some of the same benefits. It quiets the squirrel-in-a-wheel spinning of your thoughts and takes the edge off the need to engage with whatever is distracting you. It's important to do this during work hours, especially at first, because taking time out from what you see as your free time is a lot harder.

It is insane that we consider it a matter of personal responsibility to have an on-demand carnival in our homes but to have the restraint to barely use it. We light our houses daylight-bright with ceiling-mounted lights at night, and can press a button to have world-class entertainment of all sorts instantly, at any hour. That's an awful way to live.

It's nuts to think most people can live in an environment like that and not suffer negative effects. If people complained they were having trouble sleeping and difficulty focusing, what with the celebrities having a conversation the next room over, the opera in the room on the other side, the orgy in the room accessible just next to that, and their favorite band playing sets in their bedroom itself, all at once, every. single. day and night, nonstop, we'd tell them they needed to move somewhere those things weren't happening, because how could one possibly live healthily in such an environment 24/7? OK to visit, but a terrible place to live. And if anything the Internet is worse than that because there are people paid to get you to engage with it even more. It's like that scenario but also there's a promoter constantly telling you all the cool stuff going on, who will not shut up.

There's no living with our modern tech & Internet in one's house and not having serious problems. Not for the vast majority of people. The medium is the message and the message of the Internet is poor sleep and soul-sickness.

> I started a new job in October and was able to start 'fixing' myself a bit by leaving all my electronics at the office after work, and by December I could actually feel a tangible difference in how I was thinking and making decisions.

Yup, one of the best things you can do is leave your work at work. I know that is easier said than done though especially now that our "offices" and homes are one and the same thing.

It's been hard for me, but I've got physical spaces in my home (helps to have a house for this) that I use for different things. Upstairs loft (which will be a space for kids later) is my office right now. Living room is time with my wife, sitting room is my reading room. If I take a book to the sitting room, I can actually read it and get something done. I usually leave my phone in another room.

Another thing that used to work really well (recovering from a pulled muscle so I can't presently) is to leave the office and go for a run. With WFH, I started doing that again 3 days a week after work, another day was lawn work. It's not something you can choose to focus on or not, you're out there and have nothing else to do but move. It creates a clean separation between my workday and the rest of my day.

Others have given good replies about how to fill the void, and I encourage you to explore those. I’ll stick to commenting on blocking.

It sounds like you went completely cold turkey, and it worked fairly well. You truly had no electronic use outside of work?

If you can manage that, and you live alone, there is a simple solution: unplug your router and modem after work. Plug it back in before work. Then put your devices in a drawer.

This has actually worked for me, where other blocking systems have failed. The physicality and totally of the unplug do it. But it is usually difficult as most people need some access at home. If you truly don’t, this total block option opens for you. You’ll prob have to temporarily give up your data plan as well.

There are other options to block in software, or at a technical level on the router.

You can track your success with this plan on paper. Maybe one piece of paper always on your desk. Write a description of why you’re doing it, then make a “don’t break the chain” calendar and mark it off for each day. You can use this as a log too of how it’s going.

The advantage this system has is you have to consciously choose to plug in, unlike digital systems where you can sort of drift into disabling it. If needed, you can also keep a physical log book on the router to write your checkins, or have a friend try calling you to see if it’s working. (You can keep a voice plan on your phone. Without data or wifi the phone won’t be very addictive most likely)

I'm similar so here are some thoughts - I found myself in a situation where I had limited internet access. I still had access to all the files related to me "to do" project list. I instantly felt more motivated to work on them. Knowing that my connection to the internet was gone and there was nothing I could do about it for the time being caused that constant nagging in the back of your mind "whats the next funny meme" or what ever to disappear. I didn't feel compelled to mindlessly browse because I couldn't. I would suggest finding a way to severe this connection (pun intended) and it will set your mind at ease. It solves the FOMO feeling when you KNOW you can't do something. /ramble.

I have very similar issues. Two things worked for me:

- have a daily tracking system where you have clear simple goals (such as going to bed at a certain hour, the first thing you do in the morning should be productive...) and try to have "winning streaks". I use an google sheet for this and color red/green tiles based on success/failure.

- Find a buddy to work with. Since I started working with a cofounder next to me, my productivity shot up simply because I feel bad doing crap while he is working.

You could block internet access for your browser. There are a lot of apps that let you do that (and in some cases I think you can also manage internet access in your settings).

There are dedicated GPS devices (by TomTom, Garmin, etc) which are much cheaper than smart phones. In the past they provided a far better experience too, I'm not sure how they compare to Google Maps nowadays though.

Try using the LessPhone[0] launcher. I have used it off and on and had some success with it. It locks you down to a slim set of apps (configurable), in a plain black and white interface. It's not perfect, but it's helpful.

[0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=me.aswinmohan....

Is it so difficult to practice self-control?

It seems that the american/OP mindset is all about throwing dollars to the problems. No, you don't need to buy another phone so you reduce phone usage.

I have the exact same desire. I want to delete my web browsers and just keep google maps. My solution to this is to download a parental control app (I use AppLock), and block the web browser and google play.

I look up directions before-hand and draw maps. It works most of the time as long as you plan to be a little late "snoopin" around.

A simple solution is to:

1. set up parental-control restrictions that lock you out of these apps;

2. hand your phone to someone you trust, and tell them to set the unlock password for the parental-control restrictions (so that only they will know it);

3. ask that said person also does you the service of typing the password to disable the restrictions when requested—but only with 24 hours' notice. (I.e. you ask, and then 24 hours later they'll do it.)

That way, you'll never be tempted to unlock the restrictions for trivial things; but you can still e.g. reset the phone if you want to sell it. (You just need to wait 24 hours first.)

Duh. Get two.

I haven't seen anybody else mention it, but there is a method you can use. I've used it on my (unrooted) BlackBerry KeyOne to remove all Google apps, including Chrome and the Play Store.

The Android Debug Bridge allows disabling packages and APKs. There's a walkthrough on XDA Developers [1] that (I assume) is more than enough for any HN reader. If not, shoot me a message and we can walk through it together :)

[1] https://www.xda-developers.com/disable-system-app-bloatware-...

I can advice you the Nokia Tough 800, I got it for exact the same reason. it’s a decent device that runs kaiOS, has maps, whatsapp and browser. The browser is so slow that it doesnt really become a time sink, (The bulk of websites are clearly not made for this screen size) so, I just check what i need to and that’s it. Maps works really nicely on it.

This is absolutely true and shocking difficult.

You can disable every notification on your phone, mute all non urgent email, change the way you read news, block social media for a day or delete it permanently... all the small things help.

But the worst interrupters are the hardest to tame. If anyone has a Slack containment strategy, I’m all ears.

If we say distraction is actually caused FOMO, then how do you treat that? I think we are dealing here with emotional management

My problem is way too much context switching, definitely. I have done at least 20 different things since I opened the tab to read the article. Still only 1/3 of the way through the article though.

In broader strokes: Verify your assumptions, especially about yourself.

Self-discovery was an important part of becoming an independent young adult. What am I good at, what am I bad at, what do I want/need to be good at? But your brain will continue to change through your life, for better and for worse. Just because you were good at multitasking at 24 doesn't mean you still are at 34. And coping mechanisms you used to deal with other limitations might not be helping you anymore.

I've heard a lot of adults say that they still see themselves as 30, and so it's a shock when someone calls them sir, defers to their experience in a tough situation, or when they see how much grey is looking at them in the mirror. If our sense of self gets set in stone, we start to miss things.

Scrape the doc sites with httrack or something. Don't turn the internet on unless you actually hit that library problem, I think it's generally pretty clear when a significant problem has already been solved. Or move on and solve that problem tomorrow, and go do deliberate research on it and download everything at night, and then work on it again offline the next day.

> then find that someone else did it better in a library I can just import

If it involves working with some common standard or protocol, chances are it's been done before and you probably shouldn't attempt to do it yourself unless the existing implementations don't work for you.

But otherwise, why stress over it? The amount of "great" programmers in the world is tiny, so while the chances that someone did something already are high, the chances that it will be significantly better than anything you can make yourself are low.

Unless it's impractical because of the sheer size of it, the time investment involved, or some other reason, building something yourself gives many long-term benefits for the upfront investment. Owning the code, not having to deal with the community/politics, developing at your own pace, not having to worry about maintaining a fork, minimizing external dependencies and the associated risks, avoiding licensing concerns, etc.

Saying that you should use an existing library because "someone probably did it better" is F.U.D. If you're not confident in your abilities to do something better than an imaginary programmer you've never met, then you probably need to write more code and gain more confidence; and a great way to do that is to reinvent the wheel from time to time.

> I don't see how I can work while disconnected.

I'be been programming for many years almost completely offline. It has changed the way I develop in ways that are very powerful.

Having local copies of all of your needs allows for things that you just cannot do with online resources, such as locally index.

Having instantaneous (not internet fast, FAST!) fuzzy search through my entire collection of doucmentation AND all source code was a game-changer for me.

Especially when learning a new language, its powerful being able to immediatly find example uses of functions from within your local collection of libraries without having to hit on google (and wait, and click, and read, and ...).

> I don't necessarily want the "journey".

Aside: The 'journey' is typically structured wrong, dramatically speaking.

With development, the product is released at the end of the 'journey'. Boom, it's done, the end, Fin.

In a 3-act drama, the 'crisis' occurs at the midpoint of the story. It's the turning point. The iceberg hits the Titanic halfway through, Obi-Wan dies halfway through Star Wars, MacBeth kills Banquo halfway through, etc.

The product should be released at the halfway point of the 'journey'. It's the turning point for the humans in this story. We finally have the elixir and we've used it for the first time (ie. we get real feedback from the market and customers for the first time).

We're missing the rest of act 2 and the whole of act 3: the 'flight' part of act 2, the 'crisis point' at the end of act 2, and the 'synthesis' part that is act 3.

Those missing elements exist for the actual product, it's just that they are not included in the 'story' of the product. The humans in the 'journey' only make it to the intermission. It's then handed off to another team, typically. Hence, there is a lot of frustration with these 'journeys'. We don't get any synthesis.

To fix it, view the release as the halfway point in the 'journey', not the end of it. Keep the team a part of the product through the end of the dramatic 'journey'.

> These days I don't even carry a smartphone anymore, as I've found the sum of its effects to be negative.

I'm pretty close to this point myself. The big thing that keeps me from just ditching the phone entirely is Google Maps. I guess I could just chuck the thing in a drawer until I need to use it to go someplace.

Yesterday I spent 9h 31m on my phone (according to the built-in screen time tracker on my iPhone). It doesn't make me happy, but I can't stop scrolling. I think I have an issue.

I use it effectively to wake up - the flash of blue light and notifications often work better than a cup coffee.

Yeah. Seems like you are a big exception. Good for you. Tell us how we can learn from you

Do you use a dedicated alarm clock? I use the alarm on my phone, so the first thing I do in the morning is look at my phone to turn off the alarm.

You're one of the few. I try to avoid it so much, but too often find myself checking emails and the news on my phone when the alarm goes off.

Well, you have external constraints that prevent you from doing so. The suggestion is that, without such external constraints, it's fairly likely that you would be waking up with looking at your phone. But even if you didn't, it wouldn't be particularly relevant. Looking broadly across everybody I know, and that I know of, the use of electronic screens is ubiquitous throughout their lives.

Your statement basically amounts to "Well, I don't look at my phone in the morning, so clearly most other people also don't look at their phone in the morning". Which is obviously false (at least in the sense that one doesn't follow from the other).

Unfortunately my phone is literally the first thing I do when I wake up, and last thing at night. Is sometimes an hour on the phone before actually getting out of bed. I had to quit Reddit years ago because of the addiction. Don't really use Facebook. But Twitter currently has its hooks in me. It is a news source to me, about the pandemic, election, protests. But it manages to suck me in to reading extra comments and stuffs. I have been realizing it more lately, and don't want to give it up because I do think it helps me stay informed, but I need to find a way to change my usage habits because its not good.

At age eight I was persuaded into taking a job as a newspaper carrier, which I kept until I was 16. I regularly wonder how much those few hours, six days per week, to let my mind wander during those formative years, gave me, me.

Nicotine also has nootropic properties

This idea is expanded in “Bullet Journal”, which I highly recommend to try.

https://bulletjournal.com

Families I know in India 10-ish years ago used to be against the whole technology wave and were concerned with the effects of electronics. Now that they have gotten their hands on smartphones and other devices: oh man they will put the American stereotype of being obsessed with the screen to shame. 24/7 Whatsapp, Instagram, and mobile games. They will come to the same realization as we are though. Just a matter of time.

man, growing up in brooklyn during certain long power outages. i loved it. no tv's. playing cards with my family or going outside to sit on a porch alongside everyone else. candles lit up everywhere. beautiful times

> I think there’s really something to this. I have to admit there have been a number of times I’ve been caught up in something “tragic” on the internet, generally some political battle, and felt like the world was falling apart. But then if I step away from the computer and go for a walk in the nearby park, I see hundreds of people just relaxing and enjoying life, not caught up in the daily trivia. I often bring my kids along and watch them just run and play, carefree.

That daily trivia is mostly useless, because news cycles aren't capable (of willing) of sustaining attention for long. I think the current coronavirus situation in the US is a great example, where the news switched focus to the BLM protests and relaxed the covid coverage despite the issue not being fixed. now they are already moving away from blm even though the issues that sparked the protests are obviously not solved either, and covid isn't any less of a threat than it was before. The same has happened countless times: the focus is not a reflection of important issues because each issue gets only it's 15 minutes of fame.

I'd love instructions on how to set this up for myself. I've ordered the reMarkable 2 and this is definitely the use-case I have in mind.

Not really; it's exactly where people who need to read it are most likely to be found. Reminds me of an old British TV series called "Why Don't You...?" that was made for kids during the school holidays and was all about doing something other than watching TV. The full title, which was sung over the opening titles, was "Why Don't You Just Switch Off Your Television Set And Go Out And Do Something Less Boring Instead?"

Buy/acquire a whole load of books and have a large bookshelf in your house/apartment. These books should be on a range of subjects that interest you. When you find yourself with spare time, pick up one of the books that takes your fancy. I find just reading will improve my world-view, feed my imagination, and provide inspiration.

Of course without access to a library of book store, you might have to use the internet to buy the books in the first place!

Good luck!

I was pretty sure this was wrong, because there was a lot of hubbub about it being the first Nintendo-made game on phones, so I checked. From Wikipedia:

> Super Mario Run is a 2016 side-scrolling platform mobile game developed and published by Nintendo for iOS and Android devices. The game is one of Nintendo's first games developed for mobile devices, and one of the few instances that a game in the Mario series was officially released on non-Nintendo hardware.

Pokemon Go was developed (and published) by Niantic, and Fire Emblem Heroes came out over a year later than Super Mario Run did (and is also not a Nintendo game).

axios.com is the most similar that I have seen

the author's advice boils down to "timebox your internet access, and especially avoid mindless internet use in the morning"