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Comment by arocks | Hacker News Reader

Agree with a lot of points and appreciate someone writing it down. Way back in the days, I used to be a pencil and paper type programmer; there used to be very little distractions like social networks or even an online help systems.

As a result, I still have a more comprehensive knowledge of the standard library of a language or the instruction set of a microprocessor. Today, my learning is very need based. While programming, I cherry pick the information I need based on Google searches.

This leaves me extremely dependent on externalities and am faced with too many distractions. Maybe, I need to learn to tune everything else out and focus more.

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>Maybe, I need to learn to tune everything else out and focus more.

I spend every day practicing, and completely failing at this art. I've come to accept that I cannot ignore things that are going on around me. I cannot choose to focus on something.

I've only being on this planet 25 years, that's not a hell of allot of time, but in this area I can say I have experience. If you want to focus, change your environment. You cannot learn to tune something out. At least, I know I can't.

I think learning to focus and tune certain things out is a skill like any other, that anyone can learn to a degree. Admittedly I haven't made much progress here either, but I think that with practice it becomes easier.

That said, I wholeheartedly agree with your idea about changing your environment. This is the single easiest thing I've found that helps me focus. Of course, there's always still the rest of the Internet...

I end up adding known distractions that I can (mostly) do without to my system hosts list and then if I need to use them, I have them on a phone/tablet I will find more annoying to use for a longer time period, thus limiting my time and desire to use them. There's browser extensions that accomplish the same thing of course, but the hosts list takes a few more steps to circumvent.

I agree, I feel that the average productivity of a programmer before the dawn of social networking and Facebook was much higher than it is today.

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