Let Go (2011) | Hacker News Reader

Let Go (2011)

xkcd.com

50 pointsiscream2621 comments

Alt Text: After years of trying various methods, I broke this habit by pitting my impatience against my laziness. I decoupled the action and the neurological reward by setting up a simple 30-second delay I had to wait through, in which I couldn't do anything else, before any new page or chat client would load (and only allowed one to run at once). The urge to check all those sites magically vanished--and my 'productive' computer use was unaffected.

Earlier this year a link on HN introduced me to Clearspace (no association). It does exactly this. When I load an app, it forces a time delay and asks me to set the time I want to spend in it.

I've found this remarkably effective. Much more so than previous attempts to simply cold-turkey.

https://www.getclearspace.com/

> by setting up a simple 30-second delay

anyone knows an easy way to set this up from laptop?

This sounds like a relatively easy thing to build a Chrome extension for.

I also don't know if I'd want a random Chrome extension having access to my social media cookies.

There's a clearspace chrome extension

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/clearspace/geebjpi...

In previous experience with browser extension solutions, I unfortunately found it way too easy to "remove from chrome" when I wanted to get around the block.

Ultimately you can't program around self control and determination. There's always a limit to baby-proofing yourself and that's an indictment of me more than any program. However what I appreciate about the system level phone solution is that there's no easy to immediately remove it.

On a phone, the barrier to uninstall is larger than the barrier to waiting 15 seconds. The effort reverses in a browser.

I'd probably need a system level solution to effectively work for me on laptop.

I use Leechblock on Firefox (including mobile) [1]. It's also available on Chrome [2]. You can set delays, hard block, set custom time ranges (i.e. only block during working hours), make it overridable, and a lot more.

I really dig it, it helped me stop using Reddit :^)

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/leechblock-ng... [2] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/leechblock-ng/blaa...

Does this let you set a timer like described in the comic? I can't see it. I'm looking for something that makes me wait a minute before allowing a specified site to load.

It seems like it. Pick a site, choose to block it all day, use blocking method delaying page and set delay time to a selected number of seconds. Seems to work, but haven't tried this configuration before. One has to sit through the delay, if you switch context, the countdown stops(!)

As the other commenter mentioned, that'd be the Delay page. I use 60 seconds for sites like hackernews at work and it really curbs the impulse to waste time while still allowing you to use the site if you really want to.

I found this. Seems to work well:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/one-sec-%E2%8F%B3-...

56k modem.

In app purchases: Clearspace Premium (49.99/yr)

God I hate the business models of $CURRENT_YEAR

I suggest people who read a lot of news to read up on Rolf Dobelli's book named Stop Reading the news.

I found it an eye-opener and have since blocked all news websites on every device. Currently 3 weeks without a newspaper and I don't feel I am missing a thing.

The best chapters were the ones were he explained with great examples how irrelevant the news was, how news would make you less creative and feel much smaller than you really are.

Now, he also clearly tries to distinguish news and longreads. If your paper is a daily paper than tries to be very generic... you can skip it. If your paper is a medical journal and your profession is a doctor. Keep reading that medical journal.

For all social media... just delete your account and hold out for a week of withdrawal symptoms. You won't miss a thing.

I stopped following the 24 hour news cycle a good decade ago when I noticed it wasn't a positive experience and affected my mental health in a bad way.

I don't need by the minute updates on a natural disaster that doesn't affect my life in any way. Nor do I need to know every celebrity's or politician's daily movements or anything else.

I'm fine getting yesterdays news today as a summary.

Currently I only end up in on a news site if a friend sends me a link to one and the subject is interesting.

How is HN different ?

To me HN and Twitter hit that sweet spot of productive procrastination, where I feel like I'm keeping up with the tech world and learning new things, while in reality most of the things I read here aren't valuable and it's just another way to procrastinate

HN is very slow in my eyes. The front page stays quite the same and the news is more targeted to technical people.

Is there also gibberisch and pure marketing? Yes. But that will always be on an open-platform.

Reddit was the same at the start but has now become "slower tiktok" where I even get the feeling 80% of the comments are placed by bots, marketeers,... Even my local subreddits became pure thrash.

I'm a little thankful for the Reddit API change. I got a decent portion of my life back with it.

Don't seem to miss it, yet at least!

Originally posted on Feb 18, 2011.

Added above. Thanks!

I'm wondering what the title tag of the image is referring to...

Obi-wan’s spirit says “Let go” in the iconic “Use the Force” scene.

https://www.starwars.com/video/use-the-force-luke

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