
How I got my attention back - mooreds
https://backchannel.com/how-i-got-my-attention-back-c7fc9297d347#.568snktgc
======
filleokus
Previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13392292](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13392292)

------
laddng
I'd like to propose a different yet slightly related stream of thought.

One month last year, I decided to restrict my usage of lights (house lights,
digital screens, ect.). What I would do when I came home from work around 6pm
was do one last clense of my emails and then shut everything off. I would turn
off all the lights in my house and light candles instead.

It was amazing how my sleep patterns changed. By just having candle light in
the house from 6pm to 7am, I was able to easily and calmly fall asleep by 9pm
after spending a few hours cooking dinner and reading books. My sleep changed
to a point where I would slightly wake up at 4am and then gently fall back
asleep for another couple of hours.

My productivity levels during the day were better thanks to the deep sleep I
got.

Just thought I would share that experience here for those who don't have the
luxury of shutting off the internet for a month, but can do a retreat every
night to bring yourself back to a natural, calm state of mind.

~~~
tqkxzugoaupvwqr
I wonder how much of this is due to the candlelight and how much due to not
actively consuming content from a lit screen. I had a similar experience
without candlelight. I use warm LED lights in the evening. When I don't use a
laptop/phone/tablet I fall asleep much earlier. I guess just using such a
device keeps the brain active, and the light it emits is enough to delay
melatonin production, causing terrible sleep cycles.

~~~
strainer
Due to an eyesight problem I run everything on dark background including
theme, editors and web. I'm not sure if this makes me sleepy, but it is
possible to try it. The best firefox addon for dark browsing is >
[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/dark-
backgrou...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/dark-background-
light-text/)

~~~
Nuzzerino
I've been doing the dark backgrounds for years, due to being farsighted. I
recently switched to a high-contrast theme, and it is way easier on the eyes.
I think not all dark themes are equal when it comes to amount of work the eye
muscles have to do.

~~~
strainer
I see, kinda ;) I musn't grumble about my condition, just thought it relevant
that its quite possible to try working in a dark background to see if it
affects sleep cycle.

------
tdaltonc
I recently made an app to help with this.

[http://youjustneedspace.com](http://youjustneedspace.com)

We had to launch it as a web app because Apple said that "any app that
encourages you to use your phone less is not appropriate for the app store"
when we submitted the native version.

~~~
ffggvv
> any app that encourages you to use your phone less is not appropriate for
> the app store

How can this be legal?

~~~
danudey
Why would it be illegal? If Best Buy didn't want to stock a physical product
that made it easier to buy things online instead of getting them at Best Buy,
why should they have to stock it?

~~~
FungalRaincloud
One key distinction might be that Best Buy doesn't appear to be an open
marketplace. Best Buy has to purchase from the maker, to sell, whereas app
marketplaces do not purchase, they just make available. I don't know if that
has any standing in court, but it's important that we recognize that the brick
and mortar comparison does fail to completely encapsulate what we're talking
about.

~~~
iopq
>open

>Apple

I wouldn't expect anything made by Apple to be open in any way

~~~
tdaltonc
Swift and Darwin

------
wimagguc
Some 15 years ago I implemented a rule to avoid going down the interesting-
links-in-emails rabbit hole: I could only open URLs that I listed the day
before. The list could be as long as it needed to be, the stupid links from
emails could also make the list, but there was no clicking on stuff that I
didn't put on the day before.

The stupid links immediately lost their fake relevance and urgency, so even if
they were on the list, the next day I largely ignored those. (Also, this being
in 2001, when I ran out of stuff to do on the internet (whoah!), I started
inventing new stuff for the next day's list, like "what does McDonald's sell
in India".)

~~~
robbiewxyz
You know, I've used a related rule from time to time: I turned the bandwidth
limit for my browser down to a only a handful of kilobytes/second. When
clicking on that stupid link was 15-second wait, the rabbit holes broke and I
found that I put a lot more time into what I actually was there for.

This blazing fast "have what you want and have it right now"-type mentality
with information that the internet has given us sometimes caters more to
stupid curiosity than it does to real learning.

~~~
swiley
I use elinks if I need a webbrowser and don't want to get distracted since all
the silly distracting websites are so uncomfortable in it.

------
ajmurmann
For me one of the biggest problems in this regard is actually hacker news. I
feel I get allot of value out of it but also waste way too much time. So I've
been working on something that is intended to send me a daily summary of the
top articles in categories that interest me. The idea is that I won't be able
to click on other articles that are less relevant to my professional life and
save time because I get a short summary on addition to the link. Also won't be
able to read comments for a long time. Would other be interested in that as
well and would you be willing to pay for something like that?

~~~
mulrian
How are you planning on implementing categories? How do you decide if a post
if interesting to you?

~~~
ajmurmann
For MVP I'm just using the HN points. The categories are of course the tricky
part. I'm fetching the actual articles and then processing them and extracting
categories. All of that is the hard part. Especially if you don't only want
correct categories but one that remain stable over time and actually have the
right granularity that somebody would want to subscribe to it.

------
rinze
I closed my Facebook and Twitter accounts about a month ago for similar
reasons: it's not only I want my attention back, it's that users of these
systems have become their de-facto free workers (providing eyes for
advertisers and becoming live human bait to lure more eyes --your friends-- in
a never-ending, never-fully-satisfied loop). I haven't suffered from cold
turkey. Everything seems a bit slower now, and that's good.

A tangential thought: I hate reading stuff on Medium specially because they
need to feed me what other people found interesting about the article ("top
highlight!") instead of letting me do the job.

~~~
alistproducer2
Same here. I don't miss Facebook at all. I also cut the cord around the same
time and now watching TV feels so weird because of the commercials.

------
pizza
I suspect something like this relates parts of (my) cognition:

Attention ~ ∫ Interestingness dt

Interestingness ~ dBeauty/dt

Beauty ~ iterative compression of the amount of information necessary to
motivate phenomenon

Those are basically Schmidhuber's ideas, btw.

So I try to keep things tidy and quiet when I try to focus; no need to
misallocate precious limited neural spikes on "which direction are the cars
outside going," or "darn, someone has re-arranged all the belongings in my
workspace- now my hippocampus has to refill its low-resolution geometric
description of the room with high-information-cost memories of new object
locations [0]," or "hmm am I thirsty? maybe I'm thirsty.. oh did I reply to
that email yet? hmm am I thirsty? ooh I ought to check HN..." etc.

It's like that recently-popular article that talks about why you shouldn't
interrupt programmers, but generalized - you shouldn't "interrupt" any stream
of consciousness with contextually-irrelevant noise.

I feel it also has to do with why a spatio-associative memorization scheme is
very useful in humans; whether that presents itself via "the night before a
big test, I study in the same room where I will take the test" or "I memorized
200 digits of pi by remembering (3, kitchen), (1, living room), (4, garden),
(1, living room), ..., and relying upon the imagined path I take throughout
the house."

[0]
[http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fnsys.2014.00...](http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fnsys.2014.00141/full)

~~~
dpc59
When I need to focus on my computer I just go somewhere where I never use my
computer for fucking around on social media. It works great, my brain
associates places to websites.

------
acqq
In short: he made a rule for himself: no internet before bed and up until
after the lunch.

It sounds simple but it's already more than most of us were ready to accept.

~~~
danudey
That sounds fascinating, but as someone who works in IT I feel as though
refusing to use the internet until lunch would probably get me fired pretty
fast.

~~~
quest88
I'm in the same boat so I've altered the rules a bit: 1) No Internet until
work 2) Non-work related internet things wait until after lunch (no checking
the news, hackernews, twitter, etc. until after lunch).

~~~
iopq
when I used to work as a developer I didn't get any work-related things done
before lunch ever

~~~
tonyedgecombe
That's funny, I don't really get any work related things done after lunch.

------
Kiro
> In the last year I had gotten myself addicted to the game Clash of Clans.
> Not purposely. I was in Myanmar on a research job and noticed all the
> farmers were playing it, atop their buffalo in the fields (where the 3G was
> strongest). I wanted to understand what compelled them to never put down
> their phones.

That's very interesting. I didn't realize CoC was that widespread.

------
mynewtb
By not clicking clickbait? Me too but the headline still annoyed me briefly.

~~~
mooreds
I hear you, just trying to stick to the guidelines.

I think that the point that all of these tyoe of articles miss is that if
everyone is trying to create, you need someone to consume. Otherwise it's a
bunch of folks yelling into the wind.

~~~
codingdave
> you need someone to consume.

Do you? Or, does it need to be someone other than yourself? I write for its
own sake, because I enjoy it. I don't publish it anywhere. I make art, and
just hang it on my own walls. I make jewelry and don't sell it, just give it
to my family. I make sculptures that just sit in my garden. We create and
consume our own work. And it is completely satisfying.

~~~
Nition
There is a beautiful introduction in the book They Became What They Beheld by
Edmund Carpenter, who was a student of Marshall McLuhan back in the day. The
relevant part I'm thinking of:

> If you address yourself to an audience, you accept at the outset the basic
> premises that unite the audience. You put on the audience, repeating cliches
> familiar to it. But artists don't address themselves to audiences; they
> create audiences. The artist talks to himself out loud. If what he has to
> say is significant, others hear & are affected.

~~~
mooreds
That is beautiful.

------
1123581321
I was a bit shocked that the remark about Lynchburg got past the editor or
fact-checkers. Lynchburg is named after a man with the last name of Lynch and
has nothing to do with "lynching" (murdering) people.

~~~
bbatsell
Lynching is named after the brother of the man for whom Lynchburg is named.

~~~
1123581321
Yes, it's an interesting fact. However, the town's name still has nothing to
do with the term.

Also, Charles was a public official who questionably interpreted existing law
to aid the Revolutionary War by jailing British sympathizers. "Lynching"
didn't become associated with anti-black vigilante murder until closer to the
American Civil War.

------
maus42
>[...] Five months into it and I was fully hooked. I had complete farmer
empathy. I set a goal—some level, some league that seemed just on the edge of
“enough.” Make it over that line and I’d pull the plug. What makes Clash of
Clans so treacherous is that you are always building, sculpting. Five months
of work is really five months of work. Each additional day of play makes it
that much more difficult to abandon.

>As I got closer to my goal — that mythical league on the horizon — I felt the
algorithms turn on me. I sensed they knew I had a goal, and they turned that
goal into an unobtainable carrot. Was I being paranoid? Maybe. The last day I
played, I played for ten hours straight. Play the game slowly, a few minutes a
day over months, and the algorithms are insidious. Play the game in a manic
burst, and suddenly the algorithms feel laid bare. I spent only $40 over those
five months, but those last ten hours were grueling. The closer I got to the
goal, the more the algorithm would knock me down, set me up with what appeared
to be easy wins only to have me lose. Disheartened, I’d try again, this time
beating someone against whom I should have lost. Over and over this continued.
It was so perfectly tuned to my most primitive set of chemical desires that it
was actually beautiful — a thing of beauty. I could feel it moving beneath the
screen. Its tendrils and my neurons moving with an eerie synchronicity. But of
course, the lock-step relationship was weighted heavily towards the house;
just as victory was once again in sight, I was back to my position ten moves
and an hour prior. Where did it end?

I believe these problems are a major problem for the society. There is far
more and far easier opportunities to procrastinate than before, and the net
result is that the quoted stuff above is what the people do instead of doing
useful stuff. When before did you have a combined one-armed bandit and casino
inside your pocket, and it was acceptable to regularly take break from your
work -- heck, even middle of conversation with other people -- to visit one of
those?

And then people talk like developing even more insidious casinos is the future
of software industry, the thing where the VCs invest.

Economy should not grow for the sake of the ever larger GDP per capita number.
I'm not advocating for planned economy, but it should matter what kind of
things, including what kind of entertainment and other luxuries, are being
produced.

------
3chelon
I keep reading things like this, in the whole AA-style all-or-nothing
abstinence approach. Is taking a month completely disconnected really going to
help, in the long term? Or is it like an alcoholic giving up the booze for
Lent and then binging again straight afterwards?

Surely just control yourself a bit? Isn't it obvious that the whole freemium
mobile gaming model is designed to eat your time and money? As the author
pointed out, a paid-for game with an actual endpoint is a much better way to
satisfy your gaming urges without getting your life robbed from you.

As for checking your phone in bed, if that's such a problem just leave it in
another room.

If you're always checking FB on your phone, delete the app. You don't have to
delete the account: I stay in touch with lots of people on FB, but I _only_
use it via a browser on a computer. That way I can't check it while crossing
the street, but is it really so urgent? I'd rather look where I'm going.

~~~
majkinetor
It seems that some people have bigger reward then others, so you cant
extrapolate your own findings that way.

I don't have problem with addiction at all for example. I even practice
dropping the stuff that start to get too much into my life - a coffee, game,
weed, an attitude, TV, bread, car, whatever really. To me its not that hard,
but to others around me it seems hard enough.

The point is, you are a mass of checmicals, it might very well be impossible
for you to do so given your particular setup.

------
fluxic
Great article on the same subject: Life Without The Internet
[https://medium.com/@bagelboy/why-i-lived-without-wifi-for-
fi...](https://medium.com/@bagelboy/why-i-lived-without-wifi-for-five-years-
ab4a7c9c6fc3)

------
newbear

        The medium was no longer the message, it was just an asshole.

I want my attention back.

I loled thanks

------
bowedcontainer2
Highly recommend the book Deep Work by Cal Newport. Great read addressing
this.

------
pmyjavec
Wonderful write up, I travelled for about 3 months without mobile data
recently, it was a blast, the freedom was refreshing and the interactions
amazing. Actually asking locals for directions etc was really interesting and
informative.

I look forward to closing my social media accounts in the near future as I've
come to the conclusion they add very little value to my life.

------
partycoder
\- Need to get enough natural light so your pineal gland keeps your sleep
cycle in sync.

\- Need to breathe correctly.

\- Sugar makes you tired. Avoid sugary products and products with added sugar.

\- Avoid stress, anxiety and try to do something about it. Preferably in a
natural way. Identify situations that you can control, and the ones that you
can't control. Avoid getting anxious over things you cannot control.

~~~
iopq
Sugar does not make me tired. Consuming more calories actually gives me more
motivation, especially when I'm hitting the gym hard.

~~~
partycoder
Depends on the amount.

There are drinks containing 60g of sugar, or 15 teaspoons of sugar. Combine
that with a sugary snack and you will see.

~~~
iopq
no more than the same amount of other kinds of carbs

------
splesjaz
For people with multiple monitors if you get too much distracted you should
try just using 1 monitor it works for me to get my attention to work related
things.

~~~
j2bax
Sometimes I am most productive on my iPad with a word processor and a
Bluetooth keyboard. I credit it to the focused nature of just a single app. So
if I'm having trouble writing, I go there or occasionally I will go totally
analog on paper.

------
umberway
This is a tricky topic because a free and creative person is mostly acting
spontaneously so he cannot predict where his attention is going next. Go
figure.

~~~
dwaltrip
I think many creative people can benefit from attempting to be more
intentional and purposeful in how they move towards new ideas, learning, and
inspiration.

~~~
umberway
Yes, the ability to direct one's creativity is valuable and a hallmark of
freedom. But the direction, if it is to be fruitful, is determined by what one
finds genuinely interesting. This is in turn an impersonal property of those
new ideas.

The guy who is hooked on a video games is less intentional. He thinks he ought
to be able to _will_ himself into doing other stuff which he thinks he
_should_ be doing. He blames the game or phone or whatever for his failure.
But what he really doing is avoiding certain other problems. When he is ready
he'll face those unmentioned problems and maybe find a new direction.

------
anthk
I did the same with CWM + vimb from OpenBSD. Just one page open at a time.
Minimal environment.

Also, redshift -b 0.8 -O 3000K

------
CodingGuy
Want your attention back? Go and delete your facebook account NOW!

------
general_ai
Here's how you reclaim your attention: don't read irrelevant, self
aggrandizing verbal diarrhea that's 20 screenfuls long.

------
sean_patel
DUPE: + OP engaging in click-bait by changing title and posting again.

Previous click-bait Fri 13. Jan :
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13392292](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13392292)

------
trump2016
>That was the first thought I had the morning after the election. I woke. The
crushing weight of a new reality reimposed itself on my mind.

Can we just get one article on here that doesn't passive-aggressively cast a
doom and gloom vision of Donald J. Trump's presidency?

