I've been thinking about this lately, too. A long time ago, I spent almost no time on the internet, because there wasn't really much of an internet to speak of. Instead, I wrote code. Lots, and lots, and lots of code. Some of it in assembly; some of it, even, in hex, with tons of printed pages of processor instructions in front of me.
Feats like that required a level of concentration that I find almost impossible to achieve today. I've developed a tic: write a line of code, check a news site; write another line of code, check email; write another line of code, check a social site.
I can't even call it procrastination anymore. It's something far more insidious. I'm fighting it, but the fight itself requires a nearly exhausting amount of effort.
It's got all the hallmarks of an addiction -- a psychological one, rather than a chemical one, maybe. The trouble is, with many addictive substances, completely avoiding them is a reasonable solution. With the internet, looking up a function reference or even testing and uploading a piece of code can lead too easily to diversions; it's difficult to separate necessary things from distractions and impractical to avoid it altogether.
I hate it. I've tried many of the tricks that people suggest, but the simple fact is, a significant part of my personality would rather mindlessly browse the internet instead of focusing intently for a long enough period of time to do something productive.
> This leads me to believe that the ideas we have reflect the kind of world we live in.
I think this is insightful. I somehow never managed to lose track of my childhood dreams, but instead I'm constantly preventing myself from accomplishing them.
Good luck on your internet diet. If you manage to stick with it for a full month, you're a better person than I am.
I can relate to the <write line of code> and immediately switch to Twitter, email, etc. In fact, this is me right now!
However when I'm working on something truly interesting and challenging, all the distractions vanish. Tweets go unread, emails unanswered, RSS ignored. Unfortunately that state has become a lot more rare lately as I slug away on uninteresting parts of the project and my mind wanders to new ideas I don't have time or opportunity to play with.
I do think that when I was younger it was easier to be utterly immersed in a project because the whole thing was still new and challenging. Now some of the stuff I used to spend hours or days or weeks toiling away with intense concentration feel like.. busy work. It feels like I shouldn't have to program in assembly anymore and that it's tedious. It feels like I shouldn't have to implement yet another <insert data structure or process>. The act of implementing a lot of the small pieces are no longer interesting and instead I just want to get on to the large scale interesting bits, but it can seem that there's so much boilerplate and cruft in the way...
Perhaps you don't like what you're working on enough? I am generally in the same boat as you, constantly interrupted by the need for an easy information stimulus. But I have noticed that when I work on something that I truly and deeply love, then the allure of everything else fades and those "let me just check HN" thoughts are disspelled because that thing I am working on is so goddamn cool.
We all like to hack on stuff, but often our projects are a marriage of convenience between the love of hacking and some project idea that makes business sense. It is in these cases I have found there are often some very tough uphill climbs where the mind constantly tries to escape to more rewarding things. If you are smart and lucky enough to find something that is just so sock-rocking cool that you can't not think about it every waking minute, then I think your complaint would soon be that the only thing you ever want to do is work on your project :)
You are almost entirely correct. I had severe internet addiction (or so i thought) when I was working at this web dev sweat shop. I found it nearly impossible to concentrate, I was on the internet more than I was concentrating on work. One day I did an experiment. I downloaded the database, and setup my computer to work completely unplugged from the network. I was completely off the grid. Yet I still could not get work done. I would stare at the code, not really caring about it.
I found, I wasn't going to the internet because I loved the internet. I was going to the internet because I no longer had ANY interest in my work.
I quit shortly after that, my new job is extremely interesting, and my web usage has minimized severely.
I have felt the same way for a while now and upon reflection I realized that one purchase in my past had pushed me over the top in my addiction: a laptop in 2006.
I was liberated from my desk to do creative things. Think of all the beautiful places I could take may new laptop and feel the juices flowing. The world was my oyster!
Instead, I just looked at crap on the Internet from all those places. I could sit on the couch and have the Internet. I could sit outside and have the Internet. The laptop led to an iPhone. The iPhone led to the Internet while standing in line. The Internet in the car...
I still flirt with the constant idea of selling that laptop, selling that iPhone and seeing what happens. But alas all I do is flirt; I just bought a new laptop last month.
I wouldn't be, because dealing with a console all day drives me up the wall. For me, it's an utterly miserable way to work--this is the future, we have these things called "mice" and "overlapping Windows" and "text editors that don't expect you to have a modal brain or memorize three-modifier shortcuts."
I just unplug from the Internet, and have my reference materials in hardcopy or sitting on my hard drive (the complete Java and .NET references are in local storage, for example). It's not hard to do, it just takes a bit of self-discipline.
Tiling windows do not cause more mental overhead--for me. I've used awesome on my Linux machines and decided to tube it because it gave me nothing. A laptop, for example, does not have sufficient screen space to allow me to effectively tile most applications.
This faux-authoritative bullshit that infests any comments about Unix really should stop. Again: for me, tiling window managers are not pleasant or comfortable and they don't work in two of the three environments in which I work anyway. Maybe not for you, but for me. I said for me in my original post, and you come along and tell me that I'm wrong about my own experiences? Believe me, you're free to show yourself out instead of trying to correct me about personal preferences--don't let the door hit you on the way out.
> but the simple fact is, a significant part of my personality would rather mindlessly browse the internet instead of focusing intently for a long enough period of time to do something productive.
Perhaps OT, but I've come to the conclusion that this is a modern form of gluttony: We are feeding ourselves far beyond the point of nourishment.
The most successful technique I've found to fight my own periodic recalcitrance is to get enough sleep. Seriously, being even a little tired weakens my focus so much.
The second is, when I'm having very bad days, I will try and recognize that and bust out the Pomodoro method. In general I don't need it, but I've worked with it a bunch and it's "just 10 more minutes" philosophy and ever-ticking-timer help me play a carrot-stick game when I'm otherwise unable to get a good cognitive state going.
I can relate. For the last five months I have finally been committed to working full time on the idea that has been ruminating in the back of my mind for the last 10 years.
My time is spent in front of the computer doing research and writing code, and lately I have noticed that "insidious" thing too. Hacker News has become the biggest culprit so last week I enabled noprocrast mode for the first time. I was noticeably more productive.
However, even with it enabled I found myself habitually clicking on HN during context shifts -- evidently it is now wired in as a conditioned response (having it on my Chrome start page is probably one of the triggers).
Whatever it is, it's definitely noticeable and not something easily avoided because of the entanglement issue. This weekend I deactivated noprocrast to do some casual browsing and didn't turn it back on -- I probably should switch it back :)
I agree the tic you mention can be a serious problem. Here's how I dealt with it: no DSL/cable internet connection to my apartment for 6 months. Looking up technical questions on Stackoverflow was done via iPhone 3G connection (to the phone only, no tethering). Email and IM were also done via the phone.
During this time I created iOS apps. When I needed an internet connection (to download open-source code etc) I would go to a cafe, library or friend's place.
This solution is extreme. It certainly won't work for everyone (or most people for that matter). However it worked well for me so I though I'd share it.
This isn't radical enough. Allowing one hour of Facebook / HN per day is kind of like saying, "I'm going on a diet where I only eat ice cream between 8:00 and 9:00 pm."
Wikipedia is a huge time-sink. Needing online coding references is mostly laziness and habit. Download the docs you need, and if you still get stuck, read the source code of whatever it is you're stuck on. On the whole this is usually more efficient since there's no time lost in collateral browsing. (This is what I do on planes, trains, or when I've got Freedom.app turned on.)
I used to regularly go offline for 2-4 weeks at a time. I'd just go on vacation without a laptop or cell phone. One of the big lessons of being unplugged is just how wrong you are about needing to be all the time. Even as a founder I've managed to get away with going camping for a week by setting up everything so that emergency stuff goes out via SMS notification and throwing a netbook in my backpack (which effectively puts me in "push" mode for going online, which I've never needed or done on said trips).
Pull the plug completely. It'll be a much more instructive experience.
Working in PHP I find I could probably easily download the PHP docs and be nearly completely happy. Client side though is a different story, plenty of times I have look for something in the JQuery docs but needed to refer to something like a stack overflow question to really get what I need.
JQuery/ JS seem to lend themselves to many different ways to do tasks and the selectors are a bit like regex for me in that I haven't really committed it all to memory.
It is a trade off though with the distractions, possibly you could try and bank up stuff that docs don't give you the answer to and hit them all up in one go.
Pretty much the full web dev stack is open source, including jQuery. If you really get stuck, you'll actually learn more by reading the source code than by getting a piecemeal info on Stackoverflow. I don't remember having to do that with jQuery (most of the JS I write is without a JS library, and I have the rhino book), but I've frequently read the source code to bits of Rails or MRI when I've not understood something and been offline.
Yeah you definitely can glean a fair bit from the source, something like selectors is fairly verbose though as it is a parser so often it's far quicker just to Google up the specific thing you need. You can also get a deeper understanding from the source so it does probably balance out.
In 2003, I only had spotty and slow internet, so I downloaded the whole php docs as a single file. This was great, the only problem was that the file was so huge it took over a minute to fully load...
Thanks for posting that, it was much more interesting and relevant than the OP link.
By the way, if you (the figurative 'you', not RyanMcGreal) find yourself unhappy and unable to concentrate on your work, consider that you may be depressed. Several years ago, I went through a bout of deep depression. I took Zoloft for about six months and was, for the first time in a long while, able to really focus and get work done. Accomplishing things leads to satisfaction, which snowballs to help ease the unhappiness. I've read elsewhere that borderline ADD-type symptoms are associated with depression, and let's face it, sitting in front of a glowing box all day probably isn't the most psychologically healthy activity in the world.
> There are a bunch of people out there right now solving #firstworldproblems.
> A waste of talent!
No, it's not. You know what's a waste? The common "appeal to worse problems".
Just because you are not working on curing cancer or solving poverty in Africa, it doesn't mean that your work is trivial, useless, or a waste. People in the first world have problems. Solving them is anything but a waste.
Every time you bring civilization a little step further through technology, you inevitably end up helping those who work hard at what you consider worthy problems. I'm sure at some point someone considered the creation of the web as a self-serving project for academics in the first world. It turned out to be the biggest innovation of the century, greatly benefiting people everywhere.
Innovation can come from anywhere. As an example, memcached came from LiveJournal. It's important not to fall into the trap of considering #firstworldproblems as not worthy of consideration or a waste.
Why are you talking about curing cancer or solving poverty? All he said was,
"Lately we have seen a plague of Next Better Widget ™ startups and bright minds all over the world solving frivolous problems that ultimately contribute nothing to the betterment of humanity as a whole."
This isn't a first-world versus big-problem dichotomy; this is just a matter of whether or not what you're working on is measurably benefiting anyone. If not, then yes, it might be a waste of talent.
These justifications are silly, anyway. How many people, in offices all over the world, are spending significant amounts of time doing something other than work? I don't mean taking the occasional ten-minute break, I mean spending half or more of their day on Facebook or other distractions. How much GDP worldwide is being consumed by this? How much human effort is being spent just clicking on something while staring at a screen?
How much more effort do we want to put into trying to maximize all that waste?
I didn't necessarily mean you should go cure cancer, or end world poverty. There are many of first world problems that are perfectly awesome to try solving (for example, how do we convince people to use nuclear, how do we make nuclear safer? how do we make it easier for people to actually recycle? how can we help people get proper rest instead of brainrot?)
You should really look at the #firstworldproblems hashtag on twitter to get a sense of colloquial usage :)
Mmmh, he probably refers to things like developing Farmville. It is unclear why this solves any problems and not just wastes the time of users. But to be fair, if people wouldn't play Farmville doesn't mean they wouldn't find another way to waste their time :-)
That strikes me as one of those perfectly logical justifications for contributing to a problem: "Well, if we didn't produce cigarettes, someone else would anyway." It's also a red herring; it doesn't matter if someone else would or not, all that matters is whether or not we did the deed.
Well, you are right here, but that's essentially the point I try to address. Everyone of us has to decide on his own if he wants to work on something, which has no positive effect on overall society.
I don't think the Internet has had any detrimental effect on the quality of my ideas, but it certainly has had a detrimental effect on my ability to execute them.
When I wrote my MA dissertation, I suffered from the problem that I would write a few sentences, then check the internet or a book or paper, to make sure I wasn't asserting something false, or to see if I could find something to support my assertions or whatever.
It made for exceptionally slow progress.
To fix this, I took my laptop to a coffee shop where I would have to pay for internet access, without taking any books or papers (or only taking the specific one I knew I needed to refer to). Any time I felt I needed to look something up, I would write it in my notepad, and carry on writing.
Once I had hit my target word count for the day, I would go home and look up the things I had noted down, and make any necessary corrections or footnotes.
Basically, I physically separated the act of writing from the act of research.
I've not tried it for coding, so I'm not sure how well it would work. On the one hand, you can find example code, handy boilerplate, or whole libraries for many problems, saving you masses of time over actually coding it yourself, but on the other hand, I know I've wasted hours looking for existing solutions to problems, when it would have been faster to just do it myself.
I find it strange that some people in this discussion thread are trashing about companies that make stuff like farmville or facebook. So they are making something on which people are wasting their time. Does that make these people are bad or "waste of talent"? It sounds like they woke up one day and thought "lets make repetitive but addictive game/site which will enable people to waste lots and lots of their time and thus bring down our GDP". Come on guys, they found it fun to take up the challenges of making such a thing. Why should we look down upon them because they are not solving a "real" problem. To recite acangiano's example, technologies like memcached came from livejournal which was considered the biggest mode of pass time in pop culture. And even if zynga is not open sourcing something like that, so what? They are working on something they find is fun (and can make them shitloads of money) I do not think its upto us to judge their intentions (more over even if we did that, they would just sit on their pile of money and say FU).
By that logic all the game companies and social sites just shut down. (okey this is a major exaggeration of what you said, but added that because I find that a little funny.)
Don't get it wrong. Everyone has to decide on his own if he wants to work on something useful for society or not. There is no general way to judge that, but it is always a personal decision based on ethics the person considers worth to follow.
I like how he talks about "solving frivolous problems that ultimately contribute nothing to the betterment of humanity as a whole" and how it's a waste of talent.
But meanwhile, there's a giant "HipsterVision" ad on his sidebar.
I'm not sure that the Internet is the problem here. Often you discover "grand ideas" by seemingly stumble upon them or by being active in a specific problem domain. Going on an Internet diet might not help. Unless, of course, you replace all that freed-up with other activities to fuel your creativity. So if you're looking for BigHuge Social problems to solve, why not getting involved with and picking the brains of organizations that encounter these on a daily basis, organizations such as Amnesty, Greenpeace, The Red Cross or Doctors Without Borders. Together they probably experience every significant social, economic, political and environmental problem there is.
But then again, I'm not sure that the author's approach to grand ideas is that fruitful:
Lately we have seen a plague of Next Better Widget ™ startups and bright minds all over the world solving frivolous problems that ultimately contribute nothing to the betterment of humanity as a whole.
This is a dangerous fallacy as it can lead you towards a path of entrepreneurial apathy and cynicism. There's nothing wrong in positioning yourself so that you at least are solving everyday problems for people and companies. Ideally you're making a small yet valuable contribution to the improvement of lives and organizations.
Not much of a diet, that. You pretty much described what I use the internet for, about 14 hours a day. OK, perhaps I visit HN more often, but otherwise I would fit the mould.
coding reference, wikipedia, blog writing, foursquare, skype, one hour HN every day... that's hardly what we can call an Internet diet.
What about taking some holidays with no Internet at all? Like 2 or 3 weeks hiking in some remote area - it takes a few days to stop thinking about checking emails, twitter, HN etc.
Bring a notebook and take notes about your ideas. Hiking works wonders for that, you'll get tons of ideas in a day hike.
Back when my laptop wasn't the size of a fully grown hippo, I used to take day-long train trips with it. Lacking a phone to tether it to meant I had nothing else to do but working and coding. Rarely have I been as productive as during those trips.
Things that work for me: long walks, swimming, talking to myself, writing furiously, reading Sherlock Holmes, wandering around town. Note the internet does not feature in any of those.
I'm leaning this way lately as well, and do some completely offline work outdoors, reading or jotting things down with pen&paper. That has the advantage of nice scenery, too.
But I think there are upsides/downsides to being 'connected'. Prior to using the internet a lot, I probably concentrated more, but partly because my knowledge and worldview were much more limited: it was easier to just work on one thing because I didn't know that other things existed, and had no way to access them! I wasn't tempted by other problems to work on, but I also didn't know that someone else had already done something similar that I could build off of, or that there's a related thing with a ton of interesting research questions, or a fruitful connection with another subject, or an exciting new development exactly in line with my interests, etc., etc. The Wikipedia-link-wander (and Google-scholar-link-wander) is sort of a microcosm of this: I've gotten distracted by it hundreds of times, but also found a lot of very relevant stuff that way that improved my ideas, and kept me from going off on a tangent developing sort of crazy stuff in ignorance of how my ideas connected to existing ideas.
Actually this is a bad idea if you want to improve your ideas. The internet is not the problem, the problem is how you use the internet.
You can use the internet to learn about 3rd world problems and expose yourself to different cultures and issues. What you will learn is the developing world major problems are not access to education, technology and infrastructure, access will come with appropriate use of funds. Corruption, mismanagement and large criminal organizations are major problems, they lead to a major misappropriation of funds. Every country has corrupt politician and criminals, some more than others, but when you're in a developing country the effects are really devastating.
And if you want to figure out ways to solve worthwhile first world problems you can use the internet to find people who
are working on those things. There are plenty of people doing that.
I just finished "Hamlet's BlackBerry," which is exactly about taking time to disconnect to get "depth." A little preachy some times, but thought-provoking.
Basically, we haven't developed the social norms needed to put some space between our brains and maximal connectedness, but we can look to history and personal experience to try and figure out what some of them would look like.
It's got some good historical bits about how different great thinkers have dealt with technological change (writing, printing press, telegraph were as disruptive as the Internet). It's also got some personal anecdotes of the author's decision to have an 'Internet Sabbath' every weekend, where from Friday night to Monday morning there is no connectivity in his house.
I'm not sure that engineering (including social engineering) is going to work in a situation like this, but it's probably not very harmful to try.
With that list of yours, you are not being hard enough on banning the internet. I would suggest limit total internet usage to 1 hour (there are browser extensions to help with that), delete all social apps on phone, use IE6 so most good stuff won't work, remove flash plugin etc.
The best method of not wasting time on HN is just to ask yourself
"Is reading this article going to get my company started or is this content from another random dude complaining, whining or commenting on someone elses work or something irrelevant (google acquisitions, steve jobs's latest ramblings) ?"
Even if it doesnt stop you right now it will in the future - trust me. Keep asking the question to yourself. Slowly but surely it'll start kicking in.
Keep asking yourself this question everytime you are on Quora, Facebook, Hacker News, a Fantasy Football site or anything which is getting in the way of your launching your app.
This solution takes care of my need (addiction) to web reading. My need to write hasnt changed though. Finally my writing has overtaken my reading!
Isn't this like admitting you have a drug problem and instead of going cold turkey, you decide to just have an occasional hit. I agree with the authors philosophy, however you need to go full cold turkey!
I'm curious to see if there will be a follow up where he shares all of the non-shitty ideas he has while disconnected from the Internet.
Personally, I'm a little skeptical of the statement "The main difference between my ten year old self and me is the internet." I can think of many, many things that have changed since I was 10 years old that have far more impact than the Internet.
seems like the next next best widgets for hooking up with people at college and telling your friends what you're doing at SxSW have turned out to be things rather important in some of the most pivotal events we've recently seen in developing countries.
the place the first and third world are perhaps the closest in on the internet.
I wanted to go completely without at first. Then I realized 99% of my social interaction happens online and I am not interested in [essentially] walking off into the desert to think for 30 days.
Also reducing "frivolous internets" from 24/7 to an hour a day. A solid hour at that, not interspersed throughout the day ... will be hard.
But it seems that that is what you need:walking off into the desert to think for 30 days.
Try unplugging for 3 full days and each fourth day, you get only an hour.
Depends on how you count. There are only so many IRL people you can interact with on a daily basis and even with most of those I tend to keep in touch online for various reasons.
If you want ideas to pour in, just change mind work or information consumption via internet to something that doesn't require it - such as house chores, hiking, any kind of sport. Sightseeing and doing nothing for several hours also make wonders.
I found that taking the bus to work has given me 80 distraction-free minutes per day. It's much easier to focus long enough to read an entire paper or chapter of a book on the bus than in my office or living room.
i am tired of the "the web is destroying people's memories" or "causing lack of focus" jabber. the internet is a big place, its a multipurpose tool! i use it with extreme productivity to learn. i get useful information from it. yes, i fritter by casting about frivolously, and have experienced some of its addictive qualities, but like anything you gotta have goals on its use .. unless of course it is a true addiction, then i am afraid it is cold turkey for you.
OT, but the font used in the blog makes it very hard to read. Font face rendering seems to differ depending on OS and browser so I'm not sure if it's just my system (OSX / Chrome).
Takes me only a moment (upon landing at such a page) to hit my R bookmarklet. [Though there is now the pause while they process and resend from their server; I preferred the classic in-browser processing.]
I wouldn't suggest an internet diet to anyone over 15 years of age. Brains feed on information and the information on the internet is vastly more interesting than what most people encounter in an everyday "offline" life. Seems like the problem is the distractions caused by social sites. It's easy to turn that habit off, you are not missing much anyway. If you feel you are feeding too much on web fragments, read some books on a kindle for a break.
You know how in the old days people used to travel to experience something new?
This is similar.
Also there's the idea that we get really good ideas when we have time to process the information we have collected. And I do in fact use this to great advantage when developing algorithms. Learn about a problem, then just go do something else.
Let's say for the past few years I've been cramming information into my head, now I'm taking a break to see if I can't come up with some insight.
"You know how in the old days people used to travel to experience something new?"
What do you mean "in the old days"? From what I can see people are still travelling a hell of a lot to "experience something new" and this is often facilitated by the Internet. And it's hardly an age thing - most people I know in their 20s seem to be very keen on travelling.
In the olden days, people painstakingly traveled to foreign lands in order to collect information which is now instantly available. Traveling is mostly leisure/adventure nowadays. I 'm not saying that it's good to be on the internet all the time, just that the internet is not the problem.
The problem is that too much stuff on the Web is pre-digested pap. In terms of what Stephenson wrote in In the Beginning Was the Command Line..., it is turning Morlocks into Eloi.
Feats like that required a level of concentration that I find almost impossible to achieve today. I've developed a tic: write a line of code, check a news site; write another line of code, check email; write another line of code, check a social site.
I can't even call it procrastination anymore. It's something far more insidious. I'm fighting it, but the fight itself requires a nearly exhausting amount of effort.
It's got all the hallmarks of an addiction -- a psychological one, rather than a chemical one, maybe. The trouble is, with many addictive substances, completely avoiding them is a reasonable solution. With the internet, looking up a function reference or even testing and uploading a piece of code can lead too easily to diversions; it's difficult to separate necessary things from distractions and impractical to avoid it altogether.
I hate it. I've tried many of the tricks that people suggest, but the simple fact is, a significant part of my personality would rather mindlessly browse the internet instead of focusing intently for a long enough period of time to do something productive.
> This leads me to believe that the ideas we have reflect the kind of world we live in.
I think this is insightful. I somehow never managed to lose track of my childhood dreams, but instead I'm constantly preventing myself from accomplishing them.
Good luck on your internet diet. If you manage to stick with it for a full month, you're a better person than I am.