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Comment by headcanon | Hacker News Reader

This is a big part of why I don't use social media beyond HN and Reddit (if those count). Being inundated with a constant stream of notifications is not only distracting, it makes me feel less in control of my mind, and therefore, my life.

My regular email, slack notifications from work, and text messages from friends are pretty much all my introverted mind can handle, and even then I still feel out of focus much of the time. Meditating helps considerably, but it feels like I'm swimming upstream.

While I'm not immune to wanting to pull the content slot machine, at least with HN and Reddit I get at least some choice about how I interact with those environments.

View on HN

What you named can effectively kill 8h, every effin' day.

Personally, what I don't get is folks wearing smart watches, getting instant notifications when somebody pings them. Its apparently not enough that phone blinks and plays sounds and your desk vibrates, now your wrist has to. How desperately addicted to constant stream of stimuli they are, my boss including (and he still thinks his apple watch are great, but when I sit next to him I see how it fucks him pretty badly, plus its so annoying I want to throw him out through closed window myself and I am not alone).

People still somehow do their job, despite of these semi-useless gizmos, not thanks to them. Yes you can tune it down but for every person doing so there are 10, or more like 100 who don't do it at all. And not only for the case of my boss, it makes them objectively worse workers, employees, friends, parents and overall human beings.

I ran a small side business for a while - at the time I had a fitness tracker style watch that would vibrate every time I got an email or notification. At first it was thrilling but after a while as the workload got too much I realised every time it vibrated my heart rate would increase and my anxiety would spike. It felt like I was on 24/7 on-call.

Now I don't receive any notifications. I check my messages too often still, but at least it's on my terms.

I still wear a fitness tracker but now it's just a watch.

> Personally, what I don't get is folks wearing smart watches, getting instant notifications when somebody pings them.

My watch is my primary defense against interruptions. With the watch, I can leave the ringer and vibrator off on my phone entirely. When an alert happens, my watch vibrates once and that's it. It's an intrusion that's easy to ignore when I don't want to be interrupted.

I'm in the same boat. I select which apps send notifications to my watch and that prevents me from using my phone unnecessarily. Looking at my wrist is a lot easier than taking the phone out of my pocket and unlocking it. And I'm much less likely to get distracted by something unrelated.

My watch tells me when I have a meeting in 10min, if I get a call and if a family member messages. That's it. If I need to take medication I'll set an alarm as well but that's still infrequent. Only things I know I have to take action on right away.

Haha, that sounds horrible. Next up, Google Glass notifications as augmented reality pop-ups! :D

> People still somehow do their job

While getting an order of magnitude more emails/DMs than I do, both personally and professionally if they're in management roles. Sounds like hell.

HN is a killer for my productivity, even though I only try to visit it a couple of times a day. Once in the morning to read the whole front page, and then later in the day to get updates.

I need to somehow massively increase my filtering of which articles I open. I often end up reading 50% of the stories on the front page, plus the comments.

My worst productivity killer is getting into an argument early in the morning with someone on HN or a similar site. Even if I stop visiting the site, my mind keeps thinking about the argument for a couple of hours instead of whatever it is supposed to do.

The two things that help are a) if it isn't too deep, like 4 nested comment threads deep on a three day old thread, then someone may chime in while I'm away and make a similar enough point that when I come back later, I don't anything to say/add, and b) even if no one does say anything, readers aren't dumb. if I say water is wet, but someone responds, calling me an an idiot and that water isn't wet. even if no one chimes in to further respond yes it is and here's why, readers can determine for themselves and decide water is or isn't wet.

“Am I arguing with someone I do not know?”

Asking myself that question when I reply to someone who replied to me helps cut that off.

I also picture that meme-ably smug fellow sitting behind a card table with some provoking statement, and the sentence “Prove me wrong.” No, I don’t owe you my time and energy to try changing a mind not interested in changing, but in attracting attention.

"Arguing on Hacker News isn't real arguing. Prove me wrong." (sips coffee cup)

I wish I didn’t identify completely with this comment.

NO IT ISN'T YOU FOOL! ;)

Reminds me of the good old XKCD, "someone is wrong on the internet!" [0]. I also enjoy commenting here and in other places, but lately I've been tapering back, and it's nice waking up without notifications from anyone telling you you're wrong. :)

[0] https://xkcd.com/386/

It's the intermittent reinforcement caused by a useful thread once in a while that contributes to the addiction. You could choose to just check the topics you find useful, using https://histre.com/hn/

For example: https://histre.com/hn/?tags=+programming+python-ai

(disclaimer: mine)

This is exactly what keeps me on this site, and Twitter as well. Sometimes there are long spells of nothing interesting and I start to wonder why I'm even checking, but then something pops up and browsing HN becomes positive in my head again for awhile.

I save time by only reading HN for the comments.

I don't even read the comments, just stream of conscious writing.

I know what you mean. I always go to the comments first as the article might be summarized better there. It's only if I don't get what I need from the comments that I am forced to actually visit the article and read it.

I find it useful to filter to only stories over X points. 500 seems like a good bar for really great stuff. 300 for more casual reading, anything lower starts having a bunch more noise.

https://news.ycombinator.com/over?points=300

Thanks, good tip.

I switched to only looking at https://news.ycombinator.com/best and it helped a lot.

I created https://staticnews.pages.dev for myself to solve this exact problem. It only shows the top 30 stories from the previous day with a pruned comment tree. I liked the idea of a sibling comment here about filtering to stories by score, so I might tweak it to do something like that.

I've hit the point where nearly all content on Reddit and HN feels repetitive, outside a few novel articles.

The same trends and style of articles tend to pop up over and over and over. Eventually, most of them just don't resonate. They may be _amazing_ articles, but they'll just be forgotten in my sea of other work if they they're not directly relevant to what I'm working on right now.

I apparently can't link directly to the item, but the "In my profile, what is noprocrast?" on https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html may interest you

It doesn’t help that all of the documentation you need is in the same system as all of the distractions, especially since much of modern documentation is folklore projected out through blogs and sites like SO or Reddit.

Back in the day documentation was the book on your desk and that pretty much was the end of it. At worst you may have had a stack of monthly magazines that could only hold your interest for so long.

If anything during idle time you might have been reading the dustier and darker corners of your system documentation and find a surprise you could use.

I've taken it upon myself to aggresively curtail all the notifications that my phone is allowed to show me.

Texts, calls, or anything that I might need to see immediately is all that I allow. Emails, ads, and other crap gets canned the first time I see it. If it's not urgent, then I don't need to know about it.

I've even started removing notification noises from my groupchats with my friends, so the notification will let me know there's a conversation happening but I won't be pestered into participating.

> so the notification will let me know there's a conversation happening but I won't be pestered into participating

I really wish more (any?) chat programs let you know some kind of conversation was happening, but wasn't pinging you every single message. Something like every X hour(s) there's a notification that says "X messages have been received," or when a chat has been idle for an extended period of time, then after X time the first new message comes in I receive a notification for only that first message.

As is, 90% of my chat apps have notifications completely disabled, and I have to manually go in to see if anything has happened.

It's also worth mentioning how intrusive notifications have gotten.

I remember back in the Good Old Days of Android there was a notification ticker that unintrusively told me that I had gotten a notification and sampled some (or all) of the text.

Now, you can be watching a video and have 1/6th of your screen suddenly change (and repeatedly if, as mentioned, it's an active group chat)

Discord kind of does this, at least on mobile. It'll ping you the first few messages to a channel/convo, and if you ignore those it stops sending them until you open them.

I've aggressively silenced technology over the last few years and wrote about it. I just turn off anything that calls for my attention without justification.

https://nicolasbouliane.com/blog/silence

It's hard to notice the improvement, a bit like a headache that slowly subsides. But it works. I don't get sidetracked as much. Technology feels less... noisy.

I feel like I could have written this comment verbatim. Glad I'm not alone in the world. Thanks for sharing.

> This is a big part of why I don't use social media beyond HN and Reddit (if those count). Being inundated with a constant stream of notifications is not only distracting, it makes me feel less in control of my mind, and therefore, my life.

I’ve been using social media apps for years with notifications disabled. I switched phones recently and notifications got re-enabled. The deluge of useless notifications was terrifying.

I routinely go through my day’s notifications and disallow notifications from apps that I don’t want to see. It doesn’t take long to clean them up and it makes a huge difference.

Unfortunately, my worst offenders are Slack and work-related pings by a mile. It only takes a few busybodies to rain notifications down on the team all day long.

> Meditating helps considerably, but it feels like I'm swimming upstream. If it's not too much trouble, hoping you might provide your meditation routine with me/us. It's a practice I'd like to begin, but hard to know where to start, or if I'm doing it right.

Its not complicated, basically after I shower in the morning I just kneel on a yoga mat, sometimes after doing a few basic poses, then close my eyes and focus on visualizing my upcoming day. Or you can choose to focus on just breathing. If a thought appears in your head, don't force it away, just let it drift, like breathing. The key is to not try to meditate, just let what happens happen.

With experience, you'll figure out what works. All you have to do is get started, and you're guaranteed to get better after awhile and be able to start experimenting with your method. You can even do it right now! Don't have time? I read an old maxim once from a buddhist monk: "If you don't have time to meditate for 15 minutes, do it for 30".

The Calm app is good. I like the Daily Calm meditations by Tamara L.

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