My ideas are shitty so I'm going on an Internet diet

I've been thinking about this lately, too. A long time ago, I spent almost no time on the internet, because there wasn't really much of an internet to speak of. Instead, I wrote code. Lots, and lots, and lots of code. Some of it in assembly; some of it, even, in hex, with tons of printed pages of processor instructions in front of me.

Feats like that required a level of concentration that I find almost impossible to achieve today. I've developed a tic: write a line of code, check a news site; write another line of code, check email; write another line of code, check a social site.

I can't even call it procrastination anymore. It's something far more insidious. I'm fighting it, but the fight itself requires a nearly exhausting amount of effort.

It's got all the hallmarks of an addiction -- a psychological one, rather than a chemical one, maybe. The trouble is, with many addictive substances, completely avoiding them is a reasonable solution. With the internet, looking up a function reference or even testing and uploading a piece of code can lead too easily to diversions; it's difficult to separate necessary things from distractions and impractical to avoid it altogether.

I hate it. I've tried many of the tricks that people suggest, but the simple fact is, a significant part of my personality would rather mindlessly browse the internet instead of focusing intently for a long enough period of time to do something productive.

> This leads me to believe that the ideas we have reflect the kind of world we live in.

I think this is insightful. I somehow never managed to lose track of my childhood dreams, but instead I'm constantly preventing myself from accomplishing them.

Good luck on your internet diet. If you manage to stick with it for a full month, you're a better person than I am.

This isn't radical enough. Allowing one hour of Facebook / HN per day is kind of like saying, "I'm going on a diet where I only eat ice cream between 8:00 and 9:00 pm."

Wikipedia is a huge time-sink. Needing online coding references is mostly laziness and habit. Download the docs you need, and if you still get stuck, read the source code of whatever it is you're stuck on. On the whole this is usually more efficient since there's no time lost in collateral browsing. (This is what I do on planes, trains, or when I've got Freedom.app turned on.)

I used to regularly go offline for 2-4 weeks at a time. I'd just go on vacation without a laptop or cell phone. One of the big lessons of being unplugged is just how wrong you are about needing to be all the time. Even as a founder I've managed to get away with going camping for a week by setting up everything so that emergency stuff goes out via SMS notification and throwing a netbook in my backpack (which effectively puts me in "push" mode for going online, which I've never needed or done on said trips).

Pull the plug completely. It'll be a much more instructive experience.

Related: a few years ago, Aaron Swartz took a month-long internet fast.

Before: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/offline

After: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/offline2

> There are a bunch of people out there right now solving #firstworldproblems.

> A waste of talent!

No, it's not. You know what's a waste? The common "appeal to worse problems".

Just because you are not working on curing cancer or solving poverty in Africa, it doesn't mean that your work is trivial, useless, or a waste. People in the first world have problems. Solving them is anything but a waste.

Every time you bring civilization a little step further through technology, you inevitably end up helping those who work hard at what you consider worthy problems. I'm sure at some point someone considered the creation of the web as a self-serving project for academics in the first world. It turned out to be the biggest innovation of the century, greatly benefiting people everywhere.

Innovation can come from anywhere. As an example, memcached came from LiveJournal. It's important not to fall into the trap of considering #firstworldproblems as not worthy of consideration or a waste.

I don't think the Internet has had any detrimental effect on the quality of my ideas, but it certainly has had a detrimental effect on my ability to execute them.

When I wrote my MA dissertation, I suffered from the problem that I would write a few sentences, then check the internet or a book or paper, to make sure I wasn't asserting something false, or to see if I could find something to support my assertions or whatever.

It made for exceptionally slow progress.

To fix this, I took my laptop to a coffee shop where I would have to pay for internet access, without taking any books or papers (or only taking the specific one I knew I needed to refer to). Any time I felt I needed to look something up, I would write it in my notepad, and carry on writing.

Once I had hit my target word count for the day, I would go home and look up the things I had noted down, and make any necessary corrections or footnotes.

Basically, I physically separated the act of writing from the act of research.

I've not tried it for coding, so I'm not sure how well it would work. On the one hand, you can find example code, handy boilerplate, or whole libraries for many problems, saving you masses of time over actually coding it yourself, but on the other hand, I know I've wasted hours looking for existing solutions to problems, when it would have been faster to just do it myself.

I find it strange that some people in this discussion thread are trashing about companies that make stuff like farmville or facebook. So they are making something on which people are wasting their time. Does that make these people are bad or "waste of talent"? It sounds like they woke up one day and thought "lets make repetitive but addictive game/site which will enable people to waste lots and lots of their time and thus bring down our GDP". Come on guys, they found it fun to take up the challenges of making such a thing. Why should we look down upon them because they are not solving a "real" problem. To recite acangiano's example, technologies like memcached came from livejournal which was considered the biggest mode of pass time in pop culture. And even if zynga is not open sourcing something like that, so what? They are working on something they find is fun (and can make them shitloads of money) I do not think its upto us to judge their intentions (more over even if we did that, they would just sit on their pile of money and say FU).

By that logic all the game companies and social sites just shut down. (okey this is a major exaggeration of what you said, but added that because I find that a little funny.)

Edit: spellings

I like how he talks about "solving frivolous problems that ultimately contribute nothing to the betterment of humanity as a whole" and how it's a waste of talent.

But meanwhile, there's a giant "HipsterVision" ad on his sidebar.

I'm not sure that the Internet is the problem here. Often you discover "grand ideas" by seemingly stumble upon them or by being active in a specific problem domain. Going on an Internet diet might not help. Unless, of course, you replace all that freed-up with other activities to fuel your creativity. So if you're looking for BigHuge Social problems to solve, why not getting involved with and picking the brains of organizations that encounter these on a daily basis, organizations such as Amnesty, Greenpeace, The Red Cross or Doctors Without Borders. Together they probably experience every significant social, economic, political and environmental problem there is.

But then again, I'm not sure that the author's approach to grand ideas is that fruitful:

Lately we have seen a plague of Next Better Widget ™ startups and bright minds all over the world solving frivolous problems that ultimately contribute nothing to the betterment of humanity as a whole.

This is a dangerous fallacy as it can lead you towards a path of entrepreneurial apathy and cynicism. There's nothing wrong in positioning yourself so that you at least are solving everyday problems for people and companies. Ideally you're making a small yet valuable contribution to the improvement of lives and organizations.

Not much of a diet, that. You pretty much described what I use the internet for, about 14 hours a day. OK, perhaps I visit HN more often, but otherwise I would fit the mould.

coding reference, wikipedia, blog writing, foursquare, skype, one hour HN every day... that's hardly what we can call an Internet diet.

What about taking some holidays with no Internet at all? Like 2 or 3 weeks hiking in some remote area - it takes a few days to stop thinking about checking emails, twitter, HN etc.

Bring a notebook and take notes about your ideas. Hiking works wonders for that, you'll get tons of ideas in a day hike.

Things that work for me: long walks, swimming, talking to myself, writing furiously, reading Sherlock Holmes, wandering around town. Note the internet does not feature in any of those.

I'm leaning this way lately as well, and do some completely offline work outdoors, reading or jotting things down with pen&paper. That has the advantage of nice scenery, too.

But I think there are upsides/downsides to being 'connected'. Prior to using the internet a lot, I probably concentrated more, but partly because my knowledge and worldview were much more limited: it was easier to just work on one thing because I didn't know that other things existed, and had no way to access them! I wasn't tempted by other problems to work on, but I also didn't know that someone else had already done something similar that I could build off of, or that there's a related thing with a ton of interesting research questions, or a fruitful connection with another subject, or an exciting new development exactly in line with my interests, etc., etc. The Wikipedia-link-wander (and Google-scholar-link-wander) is sort of a microcosm of this: I've gotten distracted by it hundreds of times, but also found a lot of very relevant stuff that way that improved my ideas, and kept me from going off on a tangent developing sort of crazy stuff in ignorance of how my ideas connected to existing ideas.

I think allowing himself one hour of screwing off on the Internet every day is going to sabotage whatever catharsis this guy was looking for.

Actually this is a bad idea if you want to improve your ideas. The internet is not the problem, the problem is how you use the internet.

You can use the internet to learn about 3rd world problems and expose yourself to different cultures and issues. What you will learn is the developing world major problems are not access to education, technology and infrastructure, access will come with appropriate use of funds. Corruption, mismanagement and large criminal organizations are major problems, they lead to a major misappropriation of funds. Every country has corrupt politician and criminals, some more than others, but when you're in a developing country the effects are really devastating.

And if you want to figure out ways to solve worthwhile first world problems you can use the internet to find people who are working on those things. There are plenty of people doing that.

I just finished "Hamlet's BlackBerry," which is exactly about taking time to disconnect to get "depth." A little preachy some times, but thought-provoking.

Basically, we haven't developed the social norms needed to put some space between our brains and maximal connectedness, but we can look to history and personal experience to try and figure out what some of them would look like.

It's got some good historical bits about how different great thinkers have dealt with technological change (writing, printing press, telegraph were as disruptive as the Internet). It's also got some personal anecdotes of the author's decision to have an 'Internet Sabbath' every weekend, where from Friday night to Monday morning there is no connectivity in his house.

I'm not sure that engineering (including social engineering) is going to work in a situation like this, but it's probably not very harmful to try.

With that list of yours, you are not being hard enough on banning the internet. I would suggest limit total internet usage to 1 hour (there are browser extensions to help with that), delete all social apps on phone, use IE6 so most good stuff won't work, remove flash plugin etc.

What's the line? If they'd had the internet, they'd never have got round to inventing the internet.

The best method of not wasting time on HN is just to ask yourself

"Is reading this article going to get my company started or is this content from another random dude complaining, whining or commenting on someone elses work or something irrelevant (google acquisitions, steve jobs's latest ramblings) ?"

Even if it doesnt stop you right now it will in the future - trust me. Keep asking the question to yourself. Slowly but surely it'll start kicking in.

Keep asking yourself this question everytime you are on Quora, Facebook, Hacker News, a Fantasy Football site or anything which is getting in the way of your launching your app.

This solution takes care of my need (addiction) to web reading. My need to write hasnt changed though. Finally my writing has overtaken my reading!

Alright gots to go ...

Isn't this like admitting you have a drug problem and instead of going cold turkey, you decide to just have an occasional hit. I agree with the authors philosophy, however you need to go full cold turkey!

Link gives me 404 (or is that the point?).

But going by the comments, a Bob Newhart therapy is in order: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYLMTvxOaeE

404 error - page not found. It isn't on wayback machine either, coral cache has the 404 page cached.

Anyone have a working cache of this?

EDIT: go to swizec.com and the post will turn up on the front page.

I'm curious to see if there will be a follow up where he shares all of the non-shitty ideas he has while disconnected from the Internet.

Personally, I'm a little skeptical of the statement "The main difference between my ten year old self and me is the internet." I can think of many, many things that have changed since I was 10 years old that have far more impact than the Internet.

As of writing this, the link is not working for me. How come error 404 has become the new 500 for web servers under load?

seems like the next next best widgets for hooking up with people at college and telling your friends what you're doing at SxSW have turned out to be things rather important in some of the most pivotal events we've recently seen in developing countries.

the place the first and third world are perhaps the closest in on the internet.

Mmmh, would have been good if he would be stricter. I'm not sure why someone can't stay away from Facebook & Co. for 30 days.

However, in general I agree with his perception that the daily flow of news doesn't help us in focusing on the important problems of life.

"bright minds all over the world solving frivolous problems that ultimately contribute nothing to the betterment of humanity as a whole."

My favorite quote: "Strange how much human accomplishment and progress comes from contemplation of the irrelevant." - Scott Kim

If you want ideas to pour in, just change mind work or information consumption via internet to something that doesn't require it - such as house chores, hiking, any kind of sport. Sightseeing and doing nothing for several hours also make wonders.

I found that taking the bus to work has given me 80 distraction-free minutes per day. It's much easier to focus long enough to read an entire paper or chapter of a book on the bus than in my office or living room.

Let us know how it goes in the end. Do your ideas actually improve?

i am tired of the "the web is destroying people's memories" or "causing lack of focus" jabber. the internet is a big place, its a multipurpose tool! i use it with extreme productivity to learn. i get useful information from it. yes, i fritter by casting about frivolously, and have experienced some of its addictive qualities, but like anything you gotta have goals on its use .. unless of course it is a true addiction, then i am afraid it is cold turkey for you.

By all means, cut back on internet use, but if your goal is to come up with important ideas that's not much of a strategy. [EDIT: grammar]

I find this to be very helpful:

https://github.com/leftnode/get-shit-done

OT, but the font used in the blog makes it very hard to read. Font face rendering seems to differ depending on OS and browser so I'm not sure if it's just my system (OSX / Chrome).

404 Error...

=\

I wouldn't suggest an internet diet to anyone over 15 years of age. Brains feed on information and the information on the internet is vastly more interesting than what most people encounter in an everyday "offline" life. Seems like the problem is the distractions caused by social sites. It's easy to turn that habit off, you are not missing much anyway. If you feel you are feeding too much on web fragments, read some books on a kindle for a break.