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Comment by csmuk | Hacker News Reader

What you do is important, not the hours I agree, but do you know what changed my life for the better with respect to work and home without changing the hours?

I stopped watching television.

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For a while now I've had the feeling that I should stop watching Hacker News, and other online time suckers.

I thought that but Hacker News tends to be a good source of knowledge, inspiration and time saving ideas and products.

Granted there's a 1/5 chance of finding something golden but you break even eventually.

Other places, not so much.

About the only things I read are: HN, LWN and occasionally the Guardian.

I do a less extreme version of this. I don't own a TV, but I still watch a few selected shows on my computer. Doing it that way means I can watch when I want, and also has the benefit of fewer commercials. In total, I probably watch about 4 hours of mindless TV a week, when many people watch that much in a day.

It took my son a long time to accept why you can't always fast forward through ads, and why everything isn't available on-demand. He often prefers Youtube, but gets really annoyed when he can't immediately skip the ads.

I used to think live TV would survive because people like to just turn stuff on, but watching my son and other kids I realise that kids growing up with on-demand services, Youtube and DVR's don't seem to grow into that mindset: My son does not want to just turn on some channel, he instead asks for ridiculously specific things and expect it to exist. And as it turns out, most of the time he'll find something "close enough" on YouTube - even if it's some crappy homemade recording of some kid playing with his toys - if it's not something he can find on TV.

Live TV is about to become something unfashionable that old people watch, other than for a few major events.

Television was one the first in the series of productivity destroying mechanisms. Today there are things like Youtube, Facbook, Twitter and what not! If not that, there are new time wasting methods- Reddit, HN, Slashdot. Where you can have meta discussions all day.

Television to me is the least distracting of them all.

Also, 8 hours of "work" vs. 8 hours of productivity is quite different. I use pomodoro timers to track my level of productivity and when they add up to 8 hours, my brain is totally done. I'd have to squeeze in a long run to shake myself out of it.

Yep. To be honest, since excluding television I worked out I'm maximally productive for about 25-30 hours a week. I've managed to get my working hours down to that from the standard 8 hour day by minimising politics and keeping collaboration tight as anything. Those hours may be over a 40-100 hour period though.

Obsessive tracking of the time is as unhealthy I found. I keep a work log but I never read it. It's mainly for other peoples' benefit.

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