Remove wasting time on HN/reddit/watercooling and then compensating by working more hours, and cut the "cord" for all/most entertainment. Instead, read technical stuff. Even if you do it for just a couple of hours a day you'll leave most people behind. Same with programming. Ideally do it in the morning before work. So go to sleep very early.
The serendipity of HN, Reddit and Twitter have exposed me to a lot of ideas and information I would have otherwise never known about.
Reddit and Twitter are mostly a waste of time nowadays due to the signal to noise ratio. I dropped my reddit addiction and I'm working on eliminating Twitter.
I wish there were a social network system where people pool and share what they are expected to be doing and help each other. Or at least encourage each other to focus. But this goes against the advertisement paradigm where they want us to be impulsive and stupid. Sad, sad, sad.
Not directly, but by giving me new perspectives and ideas that bounce off my current perspective and ideas to create new ways of thinking about things.
My perspective now is that too much focus is a bad thing because it comes at the expense of broadening your perspective.
Reddit I agree is low signal, but I think Twitter is high signal depending on who you're following.
The signal might be good but is it the signal you should be focusing on? There is an amazing amount of interesting stuff being discovered all the time. But is it helping you achieve concrete goals?
With Twitter I see a trap. Say you work on implementing/using <Knowledge Domain X> and follow exclusively people doing similar work. They will also share things outside this domain. Since 2016 almost all science twitter users became highly political. And there is no way to filter this out.
This is a feature for Twitter and the like. They profit by making you emotional and going a rabbit hole of impulsiveness.
My point is that putting everything through the filter of "does this directly help me achieve my goals?" isn't the best way to pursue your goals, assuming we're talking about big goals where the path to achieving them isn't clear.
I recommend checking out this podcast episode called "Why Greatness Cannot be Planned". It really changed my perspective on achieving my long term goals: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhYGXYeMq_E
Also on Twitter, yeah some people don't only tweet things in their domain. But I've found that some people do reliably stick to a single domain. Though I don't really follow science people on Twitter.