Do you read HackerNews all day and never actually do anything?

[tossit]

I'm sure there are many of us out there. I have a good eye for usability, proficient enough with HTML5/CSS3+jquery, have TONS of ideas (some of which I'm pretty convinced are good, maybe even good enough for YC) but it seems like every day I just sit around and read HN. Something about reading other people's opinions, success stories and failures makes me sort of feel like I'm "in the game" even though I'm not actually DOING anything. It's terrible. I guess what I'm wondering is: has anyone else gone through this, did you eventually do something real, and how?

[klodolph]

Well, I'm working on something real right now. It's a web application that works now but it's a total hack. I want to actually make it into something usable by others so a couple days ago I black holed Reddit in /etc/hosts. It worked so well I'm considering the same for Hacker News, too.

There's the comment by "AgentConundrum" who argues that any method of limiting access to an addiction such as HN can be circumvented -- the simple truth is that you can't outsmart yourself. However, I see it differently.

When I open a browser window and click the Reddit bookmark, it gives me an error. While I'm staring at that error message, my higher thought processes have a chance to kick in and argue about what to do next. I think, "Editing my hosts file would be an admission of defeat. I'm better than that."

It's like the "brush your teeth" diet. You know, the one where you brush your teeth after you've had enough to eat. Whenever you want to have a snack, you think, "I can't... I just brushed my teeth. Snacking would undo my progress with dental hygeine."

Both of these tricks are flat-out illogical. A hypothetical rational person would not be affected by these tricks. However, if you were a hypothetical rational person, you wouldn't need to change your behavior in the first place.

[terra_t]

"Brush your teeth" never worked me. I'd get hungry and eat anyway. Two servings of whey protein powder a day, on the other hand, completely nukes my interest in snacks.

As for HN and such, I find my interest waxes and wanes. I definitely have days where it's a big distraction, particularly when I'm waiting 10 seconds for something to compile and come back ten minutes later. Then there are days when I'm too focused on coding, marketing or whatever I'm doing for it to be a big distraction.

[pdelgallego]

I do the same when I have a deadline, but I point all the time consumers websites(facebook, HN, ) to my bug tracker url so instead of getting an error I just see the list of things that need to be done or fix. It works like magic.

[melling]

HN should put a little entrepreneur badge next to your name for having shipped a product. That would motivate some people.

[ericb]

It could make a psychological difference by putting a shame/pride/credibility/game achievement effect in place. I'd put it in "feature requests" here and see what pg thinks--he is definitely interested in keeping the HN addiction in check for YC companies too.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363

In terms of an easy implementation, it could be something users self-manage on the honor system, and perhaps a "ship" icon could link to the product if applicable.

[jimboyoungblood]

As an angel investor, does that mean I can start funding companies with badges instead of money?

[pyre]

That's a great idea, but how do you define 'product' though? Plenty of people here work on things that are really just tech demos, which don't necessarily have an audience beyond, "Look at this cool thing I was able to do." E.g. that color-picker/slider thing that changed the colors are you moved the mouse (and the scroll wheel changed the contrast). I wouldn't necessarily call it a 'product,' but I would qualify the time spent making it as productive.

[Splines]

Like a Ship-It award? ;)

[noarchy]

I like to equate these sorts of ideas with the "grinds" that one sees in MMORPGS. We have reputation grinds on places like HN already, where you gain special privileges based on your point total (actually, it is your average now, right?). So do we want to add more of these things? Instead of talking about gaming the system, it will actually be a game.

[sgallant]

Or a badge for having > 10 customers for your shipped product.

[gregschlom]

There was a story recently on HN about a guy who splits his work hours into 30 minutes of work and 30 minutes of distraction. It turned out to work quite well for him. I guess I'm almost doing the same, spending most of my "distraction" time on HN.

There's a good trick however if you want to stop doing that: work with someone else, with each one being able to look at the other's monitor. Even better: do that with people you actually hired. I can guarantee you won't be spending any minute of your time procrastinating.

[zalew]

There was a story recently on HN about a guy who splits his work hours into 30 minutes of work and 30 minutes of distraction

http://chetansurpur.com/blog/2010/11/magic-work-cycle.html

[sielskr]

"work with someone else, with each one being able to look at the other's monitor."

This trick works even when the other person is remote: for the last 6 weeks, I have spent about 25 or 30 hours a week using VNC to watch someone 11 time zones away while he in turn watches me. While we watch each other, we spend almost no time procrastinating.

We both work from home, do not have TV sets in our homes, and do almost all of our procrastination on the internet.

Both of us would like to increase the number of people using this trick, so if you are interested in trying this way of using VNC to reduce procrastination, write to [email protected].

[matwood]

There was a story recently on HN about a guy who splits his work hours into 30 minutes of work and 30 minutes of distraction.

I still have my timer I used through college except I did 45 minutes on 15 minutes off. It works amazingly well for things that you don't want to be working on. Now that I work on mostly interesting problems the hardest part is getting into the zone, but once I'm there I can work for hours.

[edw519]

Simple hack: 2 computers, one for work and one for the internet. Different workstations, preferably in different rooms.

It's a lot harder to get up off your ass than to hit alt-tab.

Harness that laziness to your advantage.

[deepu_256]

Buy and iPad. use ipad strictly for consuming content - reading HN, facebook, twitter , Instapaper etc.

use your computer strictly to create stuff - code, write, design, photoshop etc etc. If you want you can install some software to block sites and apps on your computer.

This will reduce the distractions enormously. If you find yourself on ipad all the time you will feel guilty that you didnt create anything today and thus will be motivated to do something abt it.

[albertsun]

Cheaper hack if you can't afford two computers. Two seats. I don't work when sitting in my bedroom, but when I sit at my living room table I only work.

[reemrevnivek]

Impressive that you not only had the wherewithal to do this, but also are not being lazy by moving yourself to the other room to post this comment.

Seriously, though, how do you make yourself sit down at the work computer?

[thedangler]

What if you move and never come back :)

[karlzt]

you need internet for work.

[todayiamme]

Most people like edw519 have talked about practical solutions to it, but have you ever considered why you do it?

Maybe you just need excitement and intellectual company? Maybe you just want to have someone in your life that inspires you to do something? Maybe you just need to find the right people?

The point is that physical hacks for behavioral problems are ineffective until emotional hacks are taken into account. Just take a deep breath and try to understand yourself.

I'm saying this because I used to be addicted to HN, but now it just doesn't matter. After a series of realizations I'm simply indifferent to that high, and that's something far more long lasting than a firefox extension.

Take care.

[sielskr]

So you got more or better or smarter friends or work partners in your life, which stopped your HN addiction?

Or by "someone in your life that inspires" do you mean a sexual or romantic partner?

Specifics please.

[bluishgreen]

The /etc/hosts hack actually works. I don't use noprocrast since I need to visit news.yc for other good reasons during my work.

But the trick that really made the difference is this. I run a cron job which will over write the /etc/hosts with a file which has yc/reddit blocked. This way, when ever I open access for good reasons or even to have my 30 minutes per day of YC reading, the file gets overwritten in the next 30 min window and I get fed up with editing it again and again. So I give up and go back to work, sort of like nagging myself very effectively.

[ekanes]

I use the /etc/hosts block, but defeat myself if I edit it... would you be willing to share the cron job? Much oblidged!

[alex_c]

I've never been at the stage where I don't do _anything_, but I'm often frustrated that I don't do _enough_.

I went through a stage of spending way too much time on Reddit - on the order of 4-5 hours a day. This has been discussed often, but it can be crippling - as soon as you hit the tiniest mental roadblock, you switch your browser to Reddit, next thing you know it's 20 minutes later and not only is your roadblock not solved, you even forgot what you were doing. So then you read more Reddit while you try to remember.

It's terrible, and a lot of it isn't even conscious, until the day is over and you realize how little you did.

My friend made a good point - you don't NEED more than 15 minutes a day to keep up to date with what's on sites like Reddit or HN. You can spend a lot more time, but beyond a certain point it's just frustration that you've already read all of it.

So I installed LeechBlock:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4476/

I set it to allow 15 minutes of access every 6 hours to my timesinks, and I set it to not allow access to its settings during the blocked times (so I can't easily turn it off).

At first I would hit the blocked page every few minutes, without even realizing that I intended to do so. The frequency was a bit shocking, to be honest - part of it was honestly muscle memory by then (alt-tab to browser, type "re", down, enter). The blocked page made it possible to force myself to focus on work again, every time, but it also made me realize how badly my brain patterns had been disrupted - my brain just craved distractions and did NOT want to focus for more than a few minutes at a time, which is never enough to do anything meaningful.

After about a week, the cravings for distraction were a lot lower. After about two weeks, they were mostly gone. I've now settled into a good rhythm, I complete tasks without interruption and check the time sinks for a few minutes at a time in between tasks - and I always have the safety net of the 15 minutes per 6 hours limit. I usually hit that limit, but not always.

Sure, it's trivial to circumvent LeechBlock (just use a different browser, for example), but that's not the point. The point is that you are making a conscious decision that what your brain is doing is not OK, and you need to re-train it to do what you want. Things like LeechBlock are not magical solutions, but just tools to help you do that.

Edit: I prefer LeechBlock to the hostsfile hacks because it's not as rigid: it lets me settle into a natural rhythm that works for me, which also means I'm a lot less likely to turn it off and "forget" to turn it back on.

[iamwil]

I just have a "startwork" script that uncomments my etc/hosts files.

    #!/bin/sh
    bash -c "awk '{sub(/#127/, "127")};{print}' /etc/hosts > /etc/hosts.new; mv /etc/hosts.new /etc/hosts;"

And my etc/hosts looks like this:

    127.0.0.1               www.onemorelevel.com
    127.0.0.1               onemorelevel.com
    #127.0.0.1               www.hulu.com
    #127.0.0.1               news.ycombinator.com
    #127.0.0.1               www.facebook.com
    #127.0.0.1               www.youtube.com
    #127.0.0.1               www.netflix.com
    #127.0.0.1               mail.google.com
    #127.0.0.1               www.reddit.com
    127.0.0.1               www.techcrunch.com

Once I run the startwork script, sites are blocked by uncommenting the sites. There is no "startplay" script or "stop work" script, since I want to make it more painful to undo. To undo, you simply comment out the sites you want to visit.

It's been pretty effective so far. The mere fact of putting up barriers to the things that you don't want to do more of, and lowering barriers to those that you do want to do more of goes a long way.

[raphar]

very good chrome equivalent:

StayFocusd https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/laankejkbhbdhmip...

[puredemo]

LeechBlock is awesome. It actually includes wildcard blocking of subdomains as well -- that's extremely helpful to me (sadly I've found myself visiting de.reddit.com when the site was blocked in my hostfile.)

I also love the custom redirect. Great addon.

[rakkhi]

Nice addon will have to give it a try at work.

One thing that has worked well for me is the Postrank addon for Chrome for Hacker news: http://bit.ly/aKLjCT

It means rather than spending hours on Hacker news I can quickly glance to see if there is anything interesting to read and add it to Instapaper. Then read it later on Instapaper app on my phone when I have downtime on the train for example. Kind of best of both worlds, get my fix of interesting info on HN and don't lose too much productivity at work.

[sudont]

Installed on your recommendation. Will try it out, though I probably need a few more than 15... :)

[karlzt]

I experienced your same situation but with "get shit done": http://userstyles.org/styles/28042

[dolphenstein]

But what if I miss out on an insightful "How to get on TechCrunch" article or fail to provide my $0.02 advice for a "Ask HN" post?

[levesque]

Is there a chrome equivalent?

[kacy]

I have a huge problem with this. My problem is getting started. Sometimes I'm so overwhelmed by what I have to do that I either don't want to start or I don't know where to start. However, when I begin, I can code/study for hours on end. Maybe some of you are in the same boat.

Here are some tools I'm using to keep myself focused. Concentrate (http://getconcentrating.com/) blocks websites that distract me, opens/closes apps, blocks distracting apps (RSS reader, Twitter), and reminds me every ten minutes of my goals via Growl. I'm also using it with Vitamin-R (http://www.publicspace.net/Vitamin-R/index.html) to help me work in pomodoro cycles. Hope you get some use out of those apps! :-)

[pierrefar]

Yes, which is why there is a useful noprocrast setting in your profile.

[AgentConundrum]

I've never used the noprocrast option on HN, but I've tried other things. The problem is that pretty much any roadblock you put up can be trivially defeated.

For example, if I were to put sites like reddit or HN in my hosts file, and point them to 127.0.0.1, it really wouldn't take me more than 30 seconds or so to get around it. It should work as a reminder that, "oh yeah, I should be doing something else" but that never seems to work for me.

In this case, I have to assume that just logging out of HN is enough to get around the noprocrast. Assuming also that when the noprocrast is in effect you can't access HN to log out, it still only takes 30 seconds to kill the cookie(s). Even with some sort of unkillable cookie, I do webdev, so I've got easy access to Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari, and IE8. Even with something like a flash cookie which (I think) remembers you cross-browser, I also have VMs to run IE6 and IE7. Admittedly, by the time I boot up a new VM to visit HN, I'd definitely get the point that "oh, I should be working" but that's a bit beside my point.

Besides, HN is nothing compared to the time sink that is StackOverflow. There's always something I can research ad nauseum there. I've learned a lot from my procrastination, but I've got shockingly little done.

[JeanPierre]

Which is easily bypassed through private mode in any webbrowser.

[coliveira]

haha, I used noprocrast once, but it has the opposite effect. Whenever somebody says that I can't do something, this is when I try harder. It always does not work.

[LordLandon]

Two ideas:

A large part of the reason HN is so distracting, is that usually, when you read it, you look at the front page and open everything that looks interesting in new tabs. So when you're using your browser for something productive, you see a tab open that you haven't had a chance to read, and you want to go read it. Solution? Firefox profiles. Start firefox with firefox -P work --no-remote, and use that for all your work related things, while your should-read-later-eventually-maybe tabs stay happily open in another profile.

Second idea,

  echo "127.0.0.1" `sqlite3 ~/.mozilla/firefox/*default/places.sqlite "select url from moz_places order by -visit_count limit 100" | cut -d/ -f 3|sort -u| tr "\n" " "` | sudo tee -a /etc/hosts

Maybe HN isn't your only distraction, and this saves you having to figure it out.

[jgrahamc]

No, but for me Hacker News is like having the radio on in the background. It's always open in a tab and I'll read it frequently. If I wasn't doing that I'd probably be day dreaming listening to Radio 4.

[phalien]

Same here. I just started to get out of it, this is how I'm trying:

1. I made a list with all my (good!) projects ideas 2. I tried to estimate how long each would take to have a Minimum Viable Product ready for launch 3. I chose the one with the shortest time estimate 4. I split the whole project in tiny todo items (things you can do in a few hours: like "create the sitemap", "create the db structure", "outline the homepage", "make that script" etc) 5. I put the list on my desktop in a long Stickie 6. I commit to myself to mark as done at least one todo each day

And it seems to work, I'm halfway through my project now.

[newt]

No, I read reddit all day, and when I want to actually do something, I read HackerNews. It's (almost) work-related.

[dominostars]

If you're easily distracted, it doesn't matter what you're wasting time with. If it's not HN, then it's Reddit. If it's not Reddit, then it's Facebook. If it's not Facebook.. and on and on.

I keep myself going by setting personal deadlines: I don't browse the internet if I 'need' to finish something before, say, going to lunch.

EDIT: Also, before stopping work, I always try to have a good idea of what to do next. It's much easier to dive back into work because I know what to do, and my subconscious has had time to think about how to do it. This was inspired by Hemingway's 'hack':

"The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next. If you do that every day … you will never be stuck. Always stop while you are going good and don’t think about it or worry about it until you start to write the next day. That way your subconscious will work on it all the time. But if you think about it consciously or worry about it you will kill it and your brain will be tired before you start."

[rms]

And Less Wrong, and reddit... and my day generally starts in the afternoon, so the day itself isn't very long.

[duck]

I would recommend Rescue Time (http://www.rescuetime.com/ - YC08). You can try to block HN (and other time wasting sites) multiple ways, but they are easy to get around. However if you see the total time spent it might make you change your ways. Plus you can see how much time you are in programming mode and have a couple weeks can really see some trends and work on them.

[Apreche]

Yes, I do this. However, the reason is not because I am unproductive or distracted. It's because I'm at work. If I have work to do at work, I do it. Then I have no work to do. I would work on my own personal projects, but then they would be works for hire. I have to work on them at home in order to own them. Even if I get them to agree to let me work from home, I have to work on the things outside of work hours to get them to be my own property.

I would be glad to quit and just work on my own personal projects. Will you pay my rent? Didn't think so.

[jseifer]

The best thing I've found for distractions is a program called "Concentrate" on OS X. You can set time to block certain classifications of sites, such as social networks. I do the pomodoro technique which is 25 minutes code, 5 minute break alternations. You'd be surprised that you get just about the same amount of HN time in your 5 minute allotments.

I did a blog post about it here: http://jasonseifer.com/2010/02/08/using-concentrate-for-pomo....

[kacy]

I just wrote a comment to this submission before reading yours. :-) I totally agree. Concentrate is a lifesaver.

[adambyrtek]

You're in a good company, Paul Graham himself wrote about this problem several times.

http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html

http://www.paulgraham.com/distraction.html

[vaksel]

realizing that you have a problem is the first step.

you just need to get started doing something, once you are actually doing instead of dreaming, you won't have the free time to waste on distractions