<story><title>Ask HN: Help me, I fuck around on the Internet too much</title><text>The internet is my industry and takes care of me well. It is also the biggest hinderance to my productivity.
I lose a very large amount of time reading / watching stuff that seems interesting. While I have learnt a lot with my unquenchable thirst for things knowledgy, I am not able to meet my time goals.
How do you at HN avoid this trap?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>jarin</author><text>I know the feeling, you&apos;re browsing around aimlessly, checking feeds, checking forums, etc. At some point you start getting that overwhelming feeling where you know you should be doing something productive, but it&apos;s just so easy to click one more link.&lt;p&gt;Here is the sequence I follow when I realize I&apos;ve been up for 4 hours and still haven&apos;t gotten anything done yet:&lt;p&gt;- Eat something quick to prepare, if I haven&apos;t eaten yet. Watch Mixergy or something while I&apos;m cooking/eating. This is the wind-down from &quot;procrastination mode&quot;, and watching Mixergy reminds me that there are people out there busting their asses right now and taking all of my future customers or client dollars.&lt;p&gt;- Put on some good coding music. This puts my brain into &quot;serious business&quot; mode. I prefer energetic hip-hop or dubstep, something I can bop my head to and feel like a boss.&lt;p&gt;- Go through all my tabs, Pinboard and tag the ones I want to keep for later, and close all of the tabs that don&apos;t apply to what I &lt;i&gt;should&lt;/i&gt; be working on.&lt;p&gt;- Take a post-it note and write down the 3 tasks I am going to accomplish today, come hell or high water.&lt;p&gt;- Get a coffee or energy drink, have a smoke (not recommended), and use the bathroom. Get my mental game plan together.&lt;p&gt;- Open Terminal and MacVim. This sets the stage.&lt;p&gt;- Pick a task that isn&apos;t on the post-it note (but needs to be done) that takes 10 minutes or less to bust out. Could be anything from a quick design fix to a wireframe or writing up a quick estimate. This is the warm-up.&lt;p&gt;- By this point, my brain is in full-on work mode. Jump in and tackle the work.&lt;p&gt;- Feel good. Eat dinner.&lt;p&gt;- Play Starcraft.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>seancron</author><text>I also recommend using a program like Self Control[1] to blacklist distracting websites for really bad cases where you&apos;re not consciously opening a distracting website because it has become muscle memory.&lt;p&gt;In addition to using Self Control, I also like to run a small local web server to display a page like &lt;a href=&quot;http://phylab.mtu.edu/~nckelley/Focus/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://phylab.mtu.edu/~nckelley/Focus/&lt;/a&gt; whenever I try to visit a distracting website.&lt;p&gt;I plan on experimenting with some negative reinforcement by building an Arduino device that shocks me whenever I visit a distracting website when I should be working :D.&lt;p&gt;[1]&lt;p&gt;Mac: &lt;a href=&quot;http://visitsteve.com/made/selfcontrol/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://visitsteve.com/made/selfcontrol/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Linux: &lt;a href=&quot;http://svn.jklmnop.net/projects/SelfControl.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://svn.jklmnop.net/projects/SelfControl.html&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Ask HN: Help me, I fuck around on the Internet too much</title><text>The internet is my industry and takes care of me well. It is also the biggest hinderance to my productivity.
I lose a very large amount of time reading / watching stuff that seems interesting. While I have learnt a lot with my unquenchable thirst for things knowledgy, I am not able to meet my time goals.
How do you at HN avoid this trap?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>jarin</author><text>I know the feeling, you&apos;re browsing around aimlessly, checking feeds, checking forums, etc. At some point you start getting that overwhelming feeling where you know you should be doing something productive, but it&apos;s just so easy to click one more link.&lt;p&gt;Here is the sequence I follow when I realize I&apos;ve been up for 4 hours and still haven&apos;t gotten anything done yet:&lt;p&gt;- Eat something quick to prepare, if I haven&apos;t eaten yet. Watch Mixergy or something while I&apos;m cooking/eating. This is the wind-down from &quot;procrastination mode&quot;, and watching Mixergy reminds me that there are people out there busting their asses right now and taking all of my future customers or client dollars.&lt;p&gt;- Put on some good coding music. This puts my brain into &quot;serious business&quot; mode. I prefer energetic hip-hop or dubstep, something I can bop my head to and feel like a boss.&lt;p&gt;- Go through all my tabs, Pinboard and tag the ones I want to keep for later, and close all of the tabs that don&apos;t apply to what I &lt;i&gt;should&lt;/i&gt; be working on.&lt;p&gt;- Take a post-it note and write down the 3 tasks I am going to accomplish today, come hell or high water.&lt;p&gt;- Get a coffee or energy drink, have a smoke (not recommended), and use the bathroom. Get my mental game plan together.&lt;p&gt;- Open Terminal and MacVim. This sets the stage.&lt;p&gt;- Pick a task that isn&apos;t on the post-it note (but needs to be done) that takes 10 minutes or less to bust out. Could be anything from a quick design fix to a wireframe or writing up a quick estimate. This is the warm-up.&lt;p&gt;- By this point, my brain is in full-on work mode. Jump in and tackle the work.&lt;p&gt;- Feel good. Eat dinner.&lt;p&gt;- Play Starcraft.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>r0s</author><text>Setting the stage seems like an important step, I&apos;d like a way to load up a web development environment with all the trimmings on my win7 machine.&lt;p&gt;A browser profile with it&apos;s own bookmarks/extensions, a separate virtual desktop workspace, and perhaps launch a set of other apps with windows arranged to suit my multi-screen setup.&lt;p&gt;I&apos;m sure it can be done, but it&apos;s not simple or intuitive.</text></comment>