
My ideas are shitty so I'm going on an Internet diet - Swizec
http://swizec.com/blog/my-ideas-are-shitty-so-im-going-on-an-internet-diet/swizec/2239
======
thaumaturgy
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.

~~~
johnyzee
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 :)

~~~
clistctrl
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.

------
wheels
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.

~~~
robryan
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.

~~~
wheels
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.

~~~
robryan
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.

------
RyanMcGreal
Related: a few years ago, Aaron Swartz took a month-long internet fast.

Before: <http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/offline>

After: <http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/offline2>

~~~
georgieporgie
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.

------
acangiano
> 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.

~~~
Seba
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 :-)

~~~
thaumaturgy
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.

~~~
Seba
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.

------
frobozz
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.

------
whothehell
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.)

Edit: spellings

~~~
Seba
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.

~~~
whothehell
I get that. But the point is you should not try to demean the choice of
others.

------
officemonkey
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.

~~~
adestefan
Every addict has to hit rock bottom.

------
arkitaip
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.

------
troels
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.

~~~
PotatoEngineer
It's a diet, not cold-turkey. Maybe he'll develop some healthy habits, rather
than ping-ponging between internet binge and internet fast.

....or maybe he'll extend his Internet Hour to his Internet Twenty-Three
Hours, but it's still worth a shot.

------
toumhi
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.

~~~
ordinary
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.

------
revorad
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.

------
_delirium
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.

------
ryandvm
I think allowing himself one hour of screwing off on the Internet every day is
going to sabotage whatever catharsis this guy was looking for.

------
rockarage
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.

------
mshron
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.

------
arihant
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.

------
Tyrannosaurs
What's the line? If they'd had the internet, they'd never have got round to
inventing the internet.

------
keeptrying
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!

Alright gots to go ...

------
xedarius
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!

~~~
Swizec
It's a matter of practicality. As a web developer I simply cannot afford to go
cold turkey.

------
Radim
Link gives me 404 (or is that the point?).

But going by the comments, a Bob Newhart therapy is in order:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYLMTvxOaeE>

------
LiveTheDream
404 error - page not found. It isn't on wayback machine either, coral cache
has the 404 page cached.

Anyone have a working cache of this?

EDIT: go to swizec.com and the post will turn up on the front page.

------
imgabe
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.

------
__rkaup__
As of writing this, the link is not working for me. How come error 404 has
become the new 500 for web servers under load?

~~~
klaut
same here. got a 404 error.

------
nrser
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.

------
Seba
Mmmh, would have been good if he would be stricter. I'm not sure why someone
can't stay away from Facebook & Co. for 30 days.

However, in general I agree with his perception that the daily flow of news
doesn't help us in focusing on the important problems of life.

~~~
Swizec
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.

~~~
Seba
It worries me if I read that someones social interactions happens 99% online.
Are there no spouse, neighboors, friends?

~~~
Swizec
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.

99% was an exaggeration though of course :)

------
ctdonath
"bright minds all over the world solving frivolous problems that ultimately
contribute nothing to the betterment of humanity as a whole."

My favorite quote: "Strange how much human accomplishment and progress comes
from contemplation of the irrelevant." - Scott Kim

------
uladzislau
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.

------
amcintyre
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.

------
dspeyer
Let us know how it goes in the end. Do your ideas actually improve?

------
vancouveryou
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.

------
jamesrcole
By all means, cut back on internet use, but if your goal is to come up with
important ideas that's not much of a strategy. [EDIT: grammar]

------
ghotli
I find this to be very helpful:

<https://github.com/leftnode/get-shit-done>

------
oe
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).

~~~
MediaBehavior
<http://www.readability.com/>

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.]

------
metafour
404 Error...

=\

------
ristretto
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.

~~~
Swizec
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.

~~~
arethuza
"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.

~~~
giddas
...as long as there is fast wireless internet access at the destination.

~~~
prawn
Absolute worst thing though is a slow or troublesome connection; in that case
you're better off with no connection at all.

