Ask HN: What productive things do you do on your phone in place of social media? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What productive things do you do on your phone in place of social media?

8 pointsCodeSgt10 comments

I built my own boredom-killer while I was on vacation a while back, mindlessly surfing Facebook and other sites...

https://www.friendlyskies.net/fmk/index.php?tpl=Boredom-Curi...

Some of those things are more productive than others, depending. Is phys.org productive? Maybe. Listening to The Odyssey via Librivox? Could be.

Meditative art via The Useless Web? Maybe also productive...

http://lacquerlacquer.com/

I picked up a hard copy of The Odyssey recently. I'm sure it must be much better when listened to - it makes very flowery (florid?) reading.

Personally I switched away after about 15 minutes, probably going back to Dracula. Dracula is more procedural, it's like the main character reading out his computer program of a life, at the beginning anyway.

TO was interesting in some ways but read a bit like the dedication to the crown in the KJV. I did wonder if there are translations that make it more fun for the less-flowery-minded...

I actually have something to contribute here! I had found myself using my phone too much earlier this year. So I wrote a tasker script that loads (randomly) one of 9 different apps. None of them social media. 1-4 are apps like Anki, Duolingo, and such to remind me/ force me to do some chinese review 5-8 are book reading apps Kindle (2x) , Moonreader, and Libby. 9 is my camera. It enables Do Not Disturb while those apps are running as well. My own rule is that I have to spend doing a minimum of 5 min review/reading on any of the apps. And if by chance the camera opens, I have 30 seconds to set up and take a shot.

99% of the time I'm done with all these little interruptions, I don't want to look at social media anymore.

My mental health has improved tremendously after setting this up. Would recommend 10/10

Learn something new (a language? geography? history? match coworkers' faces to names?) using flashcard apps:

- https://apps.ankiweb.net/ works offline, supports pictures, sound, and other media. You can find shared decks at: https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks/

- https://quizlet.com/ features a smart deck builder which lets you crowdsource and autocomplete definitions.

Sometimes I write blog posts on Obsidian[0] and publish them into my blog[1].

[0]: https://obsidian.md

[1]: https://tsk.bearblog.dev

I investigate the topology of modulated lists, using a downloaded hp48g calculator emulator, and so gain insights into n-dimensional geometries.

HN is the nearest I come to "social media".

(Thank you, HN :) )

Read a book! I got a newer phone recently with a bigger screen and it’s actually very pleasant.

If I have a project I’m working on, mostly reading GitHub repo’s or documentation on the go

I track how I spend my time on various projects using Toggl

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