Web Surfing Helps at Work, Study Says | Hacker News Reader

Web Surfing Helps at Work, Study Says

online.wsj.com

86 pointstilt14 comments

Well, it doesn't help me. I mean, why I'm even reading this? I should be working right now...

Jokes aside, I find that reading stuff on the Internet often makes me unable to work at all - the harder problem I have to solve, the more I want to look for something interesting on the 3rd page of HN. But it's the usual procrastination stuff, covered many times on HN.

My God, I actually installed a Twitter client for Emacs today while procrastinating...

That might be procrastination but remember that the brain keeps working on different levels. While you're doing something else you might come up with the solution you were looking for.

So far I found out that procrastination brings me some benefits, namely:

- I have a better high-level overview of software development - this way I can keep in my head lots of things that I wouldn't usually think about.

- I have lots of ideas on how to solve everyone's problems :). This is actually very important for me, as my relationship with some of my friends looks like this: they come with a problem, and I throw solutions at them until one sticks, and we're all happy.

- I have lots of ideas for hobby projects that I usually don't have time to pursue :( (e.g. idea for nyan-mode was a result of procrastination and office jokes).

However, all those benefits come at the cost of me not doing things I'm supposed to be doing at the moment. When I encounter a hard-but-not-too-hard problem at work, I might procrastinate for a minute or two, but then I sit down with a piece of paper and just solve it. However, if the problem is really hard for me, procrastination becomes a way to escape from it; I might read HN indefinetly and I still wouldn't solve it. Not to mention that there's a threshold point, after which every minute spent on procrastination makes me more tired.

"Math is hard, let's go shopping"...

I find that when I have something difficult, or new, to do I want to read HN and other sites more frequently. However, once I start on those hard / new tasks they are invariably engaging enough to keep me focused. It's just that initial hump.

One trick to help get started is to make it just annoying enough to switch to the distracting task that you don't bother. Editing your hosts file which you then have reverse before surfing the distracting stuff, creating a separate login for the distracting stuff, closing your laptop lid on every task switch[1], etc.

[1] http://blog.xkcd.com/2011/02/18/distraction-affliction-corre... This works surprisingly well

Thank you for that; I recently tried to find out how he implemented his 30 second distraction-delay but I had misattributed the quote and so my search was unsuccessful. I think that the delay is a powerful idea.

The approach I'm experimenting with is a "productivity mode" toggle in a tiling windows manager which disables most of the windows manager commands, leaving me mostly stuck in whatever application(s) were already visible until I toggle it off. The toggle off function has a 30 second delay.

This doesn't tell you anything without knowing how many hours a day the test subjects usually surfed the web. A lot of people are addicted to it, so this just may be the result of satisfying a craving. By this logic, maybe alcoholics are more productive if allowed a shot of bourbon at break time.

Oof, it's hard to draw conclusions from this.

- The stuff the subjects are doing bears only a passing resemblance to the work that most of us have to do.

- Surfing the web is probably what those students are doing for breaks in work anyway on a regular basis [If you gave them no restriction, how many of them would choose surfing the web? How much is this study is just a measure of "if you let people do what they want on their breaks it's better than restricting them"]

- Were students paid differently if they performed better? Were there any incentives to perform the task at all?

- How is the control group of a study measure effectiveness of break strategies one that's doing more work? :(

Of course web surfing helps at work. First search result for "vim highlight search" on Google is:

http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Highlight_all_search_pattern_match...

Just to make sure we're highlighting everything we search for set:

:set hlsearch

Next, click on the link in the above page that says:

"Searching"

From the resulting page:

"In normal mode you can search forwards by pressing / then typing your search pattern. Press Esc to cancel or press Enter to perform the search."

So press /, e and finally enter. Done. Crap, I'm missing the upper case Es? Search for "vim search case insensitive", get:

http://joysofprogramming.com/case-sensitive-search-vim/

Oh, I need to do:

:set noic

Try it again, get all the letters highlighted, 3-5 minutes later I'm done.

Why was websurfing more productive in this case? Obviously because I can spend the remaining 15 minutes posting the trivial solution to HN. ;)

The title is a little misleading. The subjects were forced to work at a fairly menial task, and then were given a short break. A large majority of white collar workers manage their own schedule and therefore the web can be a distraction from their work throughout the day.

never have I bookmarked a url for future reference more quickly.

All I know is that without Google, IRC and sites like Stackoverflow made me not quit development. Reminding myself of those obscure bugs in major 3rd party libraries that was found in the past that I would never have solved alone. People that beleive the web is a roadblock for a developer needs a reality-check.

> Web Surfing Helps at Work, Study Says

The problem is the study didn't really find that at all. The experimental design was so contrived and artificial it is unpersuasive, difficult to imagine, and unestablished by the data, that it applies to real work situations.

Like everything else in life, when obtained in moderation.

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