Ask PG: Disconnecting Distraction progress? | Hacker News Reader

Ask PG: Disconnecting Distraction progress?

45 pointshella12 comments

I just reread Disconnectinb Distraction and saw this:

Note: The strategy described at the end of this essay didn’t work. It would work for a while, and then I’d gradually find myself using the Internet on my work computer. I’m trying other strategies now, but I think this time I’ll wait till I’m sure they work before writing about them.

1) Thank you for the openness and honesty. It's somehow comforting to know the greats suffer from distraction, too.

2) What are your current thoughts about and strategy against distraction?

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I experience this problem on a daily basis, too. A few days ago I decided to set up another user account on Ubuntu. That one, I use from 9 to 5. On this account only work related programs can be used (but no e-mail client!). What's more, I installed Leechblock[1] for Firefox. It blocks every website that is not Wikipedia or university-related.

Hopefully this will work out in the long term.

[1]https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/leechblock/

Why is there nothing as annoyingly effective as leechblock for chrome? Why? It's almost as if Google prefers you to get lost in the web, rather than work.

Of course, time on the web and adword clicks are highly correlated!

Jokes aside, there's always StayFocusd: https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/laankejkbhbdhmip...

StayFocusd provides more of a gentle hint but is not an effective cage. You should compare it to leechblock's "evil" modes. Like forcing you to type a 64-character random stream of letters and digits (that can't be copied and pasted) before accessing settings or disabling the extension when in lockdown. StayFocusd is just a right click away from being disabled, it's really not even worth installing.

It really depends on your job, but for me the key is: stay at your command-line. When you need to do some thinking or planning, don't open up your browser immediately to see what others say.

Addendum questions I have in addition to the above questions:

1) Do you find it silly or irritating being called a 'great'?

2) Do you find yourself in disagreement with the usage of such a word describing yourself? Are you unable to relate?

I've been experimenting with having my work computer be physically disconnected from the internet. I have everything I need to do my job self contained on my laptop, including documentation. If I want to use the internet I need to step away from the computer and use an iPad in another room. Theoretically it works great, but so far results have been mixed because it's such a viscous cycle I almost always find some reason I need to reconnect the internet.

A little off topic, but I was wondering if you do away with any sort of GUI on your primary desktop and only use emacs, does that get you a distraction free environment?

The problem is that I would still need to read api documents, find solutions to issuse etc.

Exactly: even when there was no X windowing system installed on my Linux and the only browser I have access to was Lynx, I found myself using Lynx to procrastinate.

ADDED. Actually, the proper way to think about anti-procrastination is "willpower conservation", and not having a graphical browser installed or not having software on the computer that allows the watching of videos does conserve significant willpower when one is trying to get work done.

That is an excellent way to think of it.

Here's how a couple of guys deal with it:

Randall Munroe (creator of xkcd): http://blog.xkcd.com/2011/02/18/distraction-affliction-corre...

Alex Payne (early Twitter employee): http://al3x.net/2009/09/14/my-get-back-to-work-hack.html

Please fill in with more examples. Preferably people who've accomplished something, as opposed to random students who managed to get their homework done in time.

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