

Ask HN: What's the best way to limit daily news consumption? - init-mtx

Right now I mainly browse reddit (endlessly), HN, have a few RSS feeds I follow and then check google news from time to time for major events.<p>All in all the time committed is huge and surfing reddit is a waste of time.<p>I came upon a recommendation here called Hacker News Digest http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hndigest.com&#x2F; which really transformed the way I read HN. It gives me 30 of the top posts everyday and that&#x27;s enough for me.  I mostly learn from HN so it&#x27;s great.<p>I&#x27;d love for there to be something like this to exist for the rest of the web. Maybe just rss an rss aggregator that limits your consumption daily.<p>Does anybody have any ideas? Trying to take control but still stay informed
======
upstill
While this is more tactical than strategic, I've saved untold thousands of
reading hours by firmly avoiding three kinds of stories: 1) predictions of the
future (which are almost always wrong, especially when proffered by experts),
2) opinionated evaluations (especially by experts), which only rarely offer
any insight, and 3) anything else that will expire in a week or a month.
Almost everything about an upcoming election will be worthless very soon; this
is a surprisingly broad category.

Notice that these three categories are all interesting, but with very low
information value. You can train yourself to detect a high
interest/information ratio and turn away when it goes off.

~~~
neillimaye
Good call. What are some headlines that scream these categories?

------
maneesh
re: getting control of the habit: The best way to break a bad habit is through
aversive conditioning ==> Electric shock classical conditioning.

I discovered how effective electric shock was a few years ago and created an
electric shock wristband called Pavlok (pavlok.com). Here are 21 studies on
the efficacy of shock for bad habits: [http://pavlok.com/blog/21-scientific-
studies-on-electric-sho...](http://pavlok.com/blog/21-scientific-studies-on-
electric-shock-aversion-therapy/)

I actually built a chrome extension that does this automatically. Get the
pavlok, pair it with your phone, and download the chrome extension. You can
add in a list of blacksites. If you access a blacksite, your wristband will
vibrate, then shock you, to train away the unwanted behavior.

~~~
superflit
Not sure if you are masochist or a genius.

But I think you are a GENIUS and have a good product.

Please do a IndieGOGO campaign.

------
nanidin
A good way to get started (for me) was to quantify how much time I was
actually wasting. I started using RescueTime[0] and realized how many hours I
was wasting on sites like Reddit and HN. Just being able to see that was a
good motivator - but it wasn't enough on its own. I then started using
StayFocusd[1] to limit my time on sites that don't contribute to my
happyness/etc.

After a couple weeks of StayFocusd, I was very rarely spending more than my
allotted one hour from 8am-7pm on those sites. And I realized. I'm not missing
out on anything. I have spent 10 hours less browsing those sites in the last
week and I don't feel like I've missed out on anything. Instead, I had 10 more
hours of my life to do things like read books, exercise, and get things done.

[0] [https://www.rescuetime.com/](https://www.rescuetime.com/)

[1]
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stayfocusd/laankej...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stayfocusd/laankejkbhbdhmipfmgcngdelahlfoji?hl=en)

~~~
mitchty
I will vouch for this method. Measure how much time you are spending and then
decide if its worth the effort.

I personally found I was wasting 1-2 hours a day on news alone. That just
isn't a productive use of time.

Another piece of advice, for the next month change nothing, write down what
crazy crap is high on the news chain. Look back at the months "news". It is
highly likely you will find that most of it is just fluff at best and
needless, and I mean this word, propaganda.

Right now I only tend to look at news sites on Fridays and then only for a day
to catch up with what happened in general. Past that not dealing with news
daily has made me a much less cynical person.

------
noir_lord

        127.0.0.1    www.reddit.com reddit.com i.reddit.com
    

In /etc/hosts works for me, the conscious effort required to remove it reminds
me not to.

~~~
100k
I do this as well. I still check news, but the affirmative effort required
limits consumption. It's not as advanced as some solutions but it's enough to
keep me from getting distracted most of the time.

I wish I could easily block my personal email without blocking my work email,
though (I use Gmail for both).

Also, using Pocket has been good for me. If I see something interesting on HN
during work hours, I'll add it to Pocket and read it later.

------
tdkl
I'd suggest Rescuetime and Stayfocusd, but it seems to me that perhaps
something bigger is missing. Do you have a clear goal and purpose in life ?
Are your days/weeks/months/years planned and thought through where you want to
go ?

Someone who does, doesn't waste time reading mindlessly. He allots daily time
for news, keeps a limited set of resources for that and picks intentionally
the topics he will only benefit from. Learning to read/skim faster is also a
nice tool for that.

------
borgia
I fell into a habit of wasting significant amounts of time reading HN and
Reddit. I found that I drastically cut back when I installed Mind The Time for
Firefox[1]. Seeing the sheer amount of time I was spending on various sites
brought about a feeling of shame and I've worked to prevent it happening again
since.

I've cut back on reading Reddit as it's just a total junk source and waste of
time now. I still spend a little time every day reading HN as it's of higher
quality and generally offers something of substance. Then I skim The Guardian
and The Telegraph once or twice per day to keep up with the general news.

I also found a site called SkimFeed[2], I believe I first found it on here
actually, which I use pretty heavily for skimming through the headlines.

[1][https://addons.mozilla.org/En-us/firefox/addon/mind-the-
time...](https://addons.mozilla.org/En-us/firefox/addon/mind-the-time/)

[2][http://skimfeed.com/](http://skimfeed.com/)

~~~
init-mtx
skimfeed is just what I am looking for. Just I'd want it to pull my own
sources.

------
petercooper
Drill down to the key topics you _need_ to stay on top of, find reputable
sources for those, then try and kill the rest (or at least leave it to your
spare time, using your phone in bed, whatever).

We do stuff like Hacker News Digest but for numerous programming related
areas, such as [http://javascriptweekly.com/](http://javascriptweekly.com/)
[http://rubyweekly.com/](http://rubyweekly.com/)
[http://dbweekly.com/](http://dbweekly.com/) (and several other) and 240,000
people trust us with this each week now. There are many great folks doing
similar things in other niches, however.

------
hnarayanan
I find that separating this process into two steps:

1\. Finding things to read, and

2\. Reading them

really works for me.

I spend some time most mornings trawling through my feeds, HN etc. and queue
up what I want to read to my read-it-later app of choice (Readability). I then
get on with my day doing normal work. Later, usually late evenings, I catch up
on the reading I've queued up for the day.

This way, I tend to stick to just the original list of things I've queued up
to read, and only get to refresh the queue the next morning. This, by design,
prevents the temptation to recursively chase down all links and related
content to whatever I'm reading, which I find eliminates the biggest cause of
the time sink.

------
mark_l_watson
I probably spend too much time on HN and Reddit, but I think I have better
control over domestic, international, and economic news: I try to use just a
few high quality sources.

First, I subscibe to Catherine Austin Fitts's Solari Report which yields a
very good alternative view of how the economy, global power, etc. work.

Secondly, if a news story interests me then I go to news.google.com and read
the same story as published in two or three different countries. There is a
ton of bias in what material is covered in USA news sources.

------
rnc
Leechblock(Firefox add-on) did the job for me; you can make the websites
available only for some amount of time per day/week and then they'll be
blocked. The effect of this after a while was that I lost interest on reading
news endlessly. In the general case, I think that first you need some tools
that force you to change your behaviour; after a while it becomes a habit and
you won't need then anymore.

------
ams6110
I stopped watching/reading all forms of news including television, newspapers,
Google News, Yahoo, whatever. Trust me, you won't miss anything.

------
eswat
Instead of going through all these aggregators and digests, I just follow the
links and news that my tribes - whether IRL, IRC or Slack – share. They act as
my curators and since we all have similar interests I trust that most things
they post will be worth my time to consume.

If you can get some curators to do this for you, then you can start blocking
these sites from your /etc/hosts and not look back.

~~~
the_watcher
I use Twitter for this, but that requires an investment in curating your
Twitter stream/lists.

------
ThrustVectoring
Trigger-action planning. (Official literature calls it "Implementation
Intentions", but that's a terrible name).

The gist of it is to tie a particular sensory experience to a particular
action you want to take. Putting a pull-up bar on your bedroom door is a great
example - then, every time you go through the door, you can exercise with the
pull-up bar. For reddit, you can either trigger off of "opening a reddit tab"
or scrolling to the bottom of the current page, and close the tab when that
happens.

Another approach is to figure out what you get out of browsing reddit, and
finding better ways of getting the same stuff. Odds are it's a combination of
a low-risk activity, encountering novel information, and a strategy for not
doing things that you "should" do but don't want to. If you're reliably
getting safe and interesting information from a reading list and
procrastinating through exercise, then you may well find that you've solved
the urge to visit reddit.

------
the_watcher
Big change for me was finally making the switch from RSS to Twitter. I didn't
really do it consciously, I just found myself checking my RSS feeds less when
I was busy, as getting through a lot of outdated news while still not missing
the stuff I'm interested in took a lot of time. At the same time, I found
myself continuing to check Twitter and Facebook for social conversation
purposes, but finding that most of the things I found interesting when I
finally got around to checking my RSS feeds were pieces I'd already found via
Twitter or Facebook or just a coworker shooting it out. I've now completely
stopped checking my RSS feeds after moving the few sites on there I didn't
already follow on Twitter. I haven't noticed that I've missed anything I would
have otherwise caught (anecdotal, but measured by how often links sent to me
by friends or mentioned in conversation are ones I didn't see), and the time I
spend on news has cratered.

~~~
the_watcher
Also, if you are like me and use pinned tabs for the sites you find yourself
on the most, close the HN and Reddit tabs. I spend time on both sites, but not
having them pinned makes the decision to visit them an active one, rather than
(psychologically) constant browsing.

Also, related to switching to Twitter (this applies to Reddit too) - either
make the investment in lists, mute people who don't tweet anything you are
interested in that you are hesitant to unfollow, or be rigorous in curating
who you follow. The noise of Twitter is by far the most common reason I hear
for not using Twitter to replace RSS, but it's something you can pretty easily
address in 30 minutes.

------
PeterWhittaker
Don't read reddit. Or at least read very little.

I have very few news sites in the folder I "open all in tabs" every morning:
Google News, /. (I'm nostalgic, it's not terribly useful), HN (via
hckrnews.com with Link Visitor to mark as read), and reddit.com/r/science
(plus Environment Canada, Michael Geist, and XKCD).

I check those most mornings, then check /. and hckrnews a few times a day.

Sometimes I want more, but I've learned to resist that want. Between HN and
Google News, I encounter most of the things I need to know. And, of course, I
see news stories in my FB feed, shared by friends, mostly dross, but some few
nuggets.

And I never go beyond the first page of any of those (except /., I tend to
work back to the last story seen, but that takes very little time).

Imperfect heuristic for validating the _I encounter most of the things I need
to know_ statement: Never, not once, has my life been affected in any
meaningful way by a story with which I was unfamiliar, I have rarely been
surprised professionally by unfamiliar news (I am a security consultant) and
never with any impact (interesting, I will look that up and get back to you).

We are all here likely to be voracious readers, curious beyond measure. We.
Do. Not. Need. To. Know. Everything. Your brain is likely already full.

As someone else mentioned, willpower helps too, and if you don't have
willpower, get a hobby you like, and then start examining how much of your
hobby time you spend reading news that has little/no impact on your life.

Note: I have never used RSS, have a twitter account but hardly ever go there,
rarely listen to radio news and never watch TV news. I do not seek to optimize
the amount of information I consume, I seek for and seem to have found "pretty
darned good enough".

------
soneil
A large part of my 'solution' has to be to listen to the radio for non-tech
news. It's become part of my "don't stare into screens right before you want
to go to sleep" ritual, with a nice side-effect of helping me regulate my
bedtime.

Pick a source you're comfortable with (being british, I listen to the bbc
world service - it's quite international but with a british bias, which suits
me fine). Listen to it on their schedule, not yours (no podcasts, live
broadcasts). This way you get a 30 minute summary, select few comments from
people with basic literacy, with no "you might also be interested in", no
sidebars, no opening a few tangents in tabs, etc.

------
whichfawkes
Find something you enjoy more than reddit, and which entices you to spend your
free time more meaningfully.

I used to browse reddit excessively, but then I realized how much more I like
HN, and started reading some more books and getting more exercise.

I still check reddit occasionally, (I have multi-reddits set up to aggregate
the few things I care about), but I get tired of it pretty quickly because I'd
rather be reading a book or going outside, or reading HN.

I like HN more, but my time on here naturally comes to an end when I've seen
the 1-3 interesting things on the front page that I might want to read. After
I've seen the things that are most interesting, it's more worth my time to do
something else.

------
nextweek2
I trim the fat every now an again, everything is read via Feedly and I have it
on my phone to really quick scanning over whilst doing menial things like
eating breakfast or traveling. Marking interesting stuff for reading later.

The major time saver is really not reading or replying to comments. Hackernews
is the opposite to that rule where most of the time the comments are more
insightful than the article.

Think of it in term of signal to noise ratio. How much good information have
you gained and how much did you have to wade through to get there. Comments
sections on websites are usually high noise. Reddit is no exception in my
experience. There might be microcosms of insight but finding them is too hard.

~~~
the_watcher
Another good tip - periodically looking at where you are spending your time
reading and cutting those that are just taking up your time (ESPN headlines
Twitter was one for me - anything noteworthy to me gets to me through
sites/channels I follow for more specific reasons) will make a difference.
It's tough to use this strategy for Reddit and HN though.

------
pakled_engineer
[http://matt.might.net/articles/productivity-tips-hints-
hacks...](http://matt.might.net/articles/productivity-tips-hints-hacks-tricks-
for-grad-students-academics/)

[http://matt.might.net/articles/cripple-your-
technology/](http://matt.might.net/articles/cripple-your-technology/)

He blocks reddit and other time sinkholes, uses a tablet or phone to waste
time on those sites as you can put it down or move it out of your workspace if
you don't want to be distracted.

~~~
the_watcher
Limiting consumption to tablet/smartphone is actually a really good idea,
especially if you use a service like Pocket for saving things you'd get more
value out of on desktop. I might try this. The only limitation is
participating in Reddit comments and HN comments is a lot more difficult on a
tablet or phone (although that might be a feature).

------
butwhy
I don't see how you're going to find a "best of" for reddit. There are so many
subreddits that everyone will be different. Although the frontpage of reddit
already seems to give you an overview of all the top content in the subreddits
you're subscribed to, if you're logged in. Just limit yourself to the
frontpage, I guess.

~~~
init-mtx
Reddit can be done via the rss of the subreddit. Each has it's own.

~~~
butwhy
So what? It would display the same thing as going to reddit, which is what op
wants to avoid.

------
gkelly
I built a twitter bot that tweets the top HN stories from 24 hours ago. I like
to visit it on Monday to catch up after the weekend. It's a lot less content
than the RSS feed.

[https://twitter.com/icymihn](https://twitter.com/icymihn)

------
lgas
Willpower.

~~~
alimoeeny
Willpower is a finite resource, I'd rather use it as little as possible and
keep it for more important matters.

So ideally, in cases that you know before hand that you are going to need your
willpower, like reading HN, you'd be better off arranging your life so that
you don't have the option to spend as much time, and reserve your willpower
for cases you cannot predict or control.

~~~
XzetaU8
Willpower is Not a Finite Resource

[http://lifehacker.com/5967249/your-willpower-is-only-a-
finit...](http://lifehacker.com/5967249/your-willpower-is-only-a-finite-
resource-if-you-believe-it-is)

------
the_watcher
Startup Digest is another useful one if you prefer the email digest system.

