For a long time I felt (and now feel) the same as you. I just wanted to share an experience that, while completely anecdotal, is perhaps atypical, and has been one of the defining experiences of my life.
I got the Internet as a birthday present on my 8th birthday, and pretty much disappeared from normal society for the next few years. The Internet was (and is) fascinating - I could learn anything, interact with people I'd never met with, and, notably, do adult things without anyone doubting me because I was young.
But as I got older, the Internet, and therefore my mind, just got busier. Eventually it was not only random articles and a few chatrooms, but dozens of apps and sites that are programmed to give us a dopamine hit. Being online to me feels like walking around in a casino trying not to gamble.
I don't think I concentrated on one thing for more than 20 minutes for years, and outside of school I didn't have to. So I just convinced myself that school was archaic, skipped as much class as I could, and ended up a mental butterfly. It was working for me.
Except for when I wanted to get stuff done. I probably started learning to program 100 times, but I would get distracted with cat pictures or something, and even though I loved computers more than anything else, I couldn't do much to create with them. I was diagnosed with ADHD, but I didn't really care; I don't think that experience is unique to either me or people who have been diagnosed with ADHD.
Then, all of the sudden, I went on a Mormon mission in eastern Ukraine. Two years with 30 minutes of Internet a week (at an Internet club 45 mins away from my apartment). My entire life was structured in a way I never would have structured it in order to get me to concentrate on the things I considered most important for that period of time.
My mind slowed down - in an almost literal sense. I had only finished a couple of books in my entire life before the mission, and on the mission I could easily read the Old Testament for hours on end, paying attention to intricacies of text I never would have realized before.
Then I got home. I jumped on Facebook, and right back into my old habits. My mind was gone for weeks. Not gone in the sense that I wasn't learning anything -- I would pick up tidbits here and there, but I never got deep enough into anything to make any of that learning useful. It terrified me.
So now I spend a lot of time on very strict information diets. I severely limit my time on HN, Reddit, Facebook. I try to keep my reading on a Kindle so the Internet isn't even an option. I would love for someone to create an app (that works) that limits what sites I can use so I can go into "wired in" mode when I'm programming.
In short, don't be afraid to place restrictions on yourself. Let your mind slow down.
> It cannot be turned off and you can set it for a specific amount of time
I almost stopped using the app due to the lack of an off button, after my boss asked for some data and I could not get it on time because the website was not on my whitelist.
Luckily, there is a way of turning it off. If you don't want to know it skip the rest of this comment, and otherwise here it is, in case someone needs it: the app uses the local time, so by changing your computer's time forward you can end the block earlier.
A chrome extension I use called stay focus has an option to require typing a long document exactly in order to disable it. Unfortunately it's trivial for even a mildly technical person to figure out how to get around it, so it's become useless for self control.
No, it counts keystrokes too, so that doesn't work. I haven't tried to get past it myself, but really all I'd do to sidestep it is go to incognito, or use one of my other browsers.
I mean the extension itself is very easy to bypass. Just right click on it and remove it or disable it. You can also go into incognito, or a different user, different browser, etc.
I severely limit what's on my phone - no social apps, for example, and it's enough of a pain that I don't browse the Internet on it much. So I've mostly solved that problem.
This sounds very common to me and countless other friends who work in tech/online -
I half wonder if I am not meant to work in front of a computer the rest of my life. I sometimes think it would be more beneficial to pursue something more blue collar like becoming an electrician or something similar. Sure, access to a smart phone these days still provides plenty of access to distractions, but what if my job wasn't so involved with actually NEEDING to be in front of a screen all day?
No idea if I could ever make the leap, but I do often see the appeal.
If you want to try this, don't wait too long. Being an electrician is a though job physically. If you're past 35 and you're used to sitting in front of a screen for a living, your body will have difficulties readjusting to the strain.
Source: I did this myself about 5 years ago, following a complete burnout on being a C++ developer. Worked as an electrician for about 18 months.
Try stayfocused- I used it all through med school. Half an hour on my 'big 4' - smh.com.au, HN, facebook, wired and later reddit a week.
During exams I'd hit the nuclear options n and only allow wikipedia and university sites.
It's an app that doesn't work in the specific way that you wish, but I have found leechblock to be a wonderful addition to my internet life: http://www.proginosko.com/leechblock.html
You can eliminate large swaths of the internet from loading in your browser and control what sets of sites are blocked when.
I was having trouble with Leechblock until I realized I could redirect the page to something like a static image. I often find myself blinking and staring at a Leechblocked result without quite knowing how I got there, particularly from the middle of a flow state. (I'll be hacking on something and randomly open browser, ctrl+l, "reddit.com" without conscious thought.)
I change up the image every few days but I try to have it point to something like the recent Orion launch or a trip photo from the Portland Hikers Field Guide. Instead of redirecting to Google's homepage (which is what I did at first), seeing the image gives me positive reinforcement to pause and be more mindful about what I'm doing, where my head is at, etc.
It's been an enormous help in instilling my habit to stay focused.
On osx and linux, you can edit your /etc/hosts file to "uninstall" domains (e.g. reroute them to localhost). The barrier-to-edit is involved enough (prompt for root password, invoking an editor, etc) to at least slow you down before you undo the block.
I set a simple cron job to do just this. Weekdays from 9-5, Facebook, Reddit, and a few other sites are routed to localhost. Getting around it is more of a pain than just opening an Incognito tab, which is all that's required to get around a blocking browser extension.
Just having that schedule imposed on me for a few days was all it took for me to get out of the habit of opening a new tab and heading to one of the aforementioned sites any time I ran into a difficult problem. I've noticed an increase in my productivity, and I don't really even feel the need to twiddle away that time anymore.
Thanks for sharing. Allow me to provide another possible aid for those who would not be well-served by the kind of isolation and regimented schedule one would encounter on a Mormon mission (e.g. those with delayed sleep phase). I also went on such a mission for two years, and my mind could never adapt to the 14-hour 6-day workweeks.
The only solution that worked for me, which I figured out years later, was controlled caffeine intake with just the right calorie balance plus an interesting career that isn't affected by delayed sleep phase. With those two things, my motivation increases, scatterbrainedness decreases, and I can get significant things done.
It's cool to hear that a Mission helped someone in a real tangible way.
But, as a counterpoint to the "beneficial" Mormon story, I would like suggest that my early experience in the organization was not very good (I left as soon as I was old enough to legally do so. I would have left at 13 had parents permitted.).
I am firmly convinced these types of organizations often induce strange mental problems of their own which are often far worse than the sins they are trying to cure.
Not to slam anyone's beliefs, just a counterpoint to "hey, this helped me!". It didn't help me, and it has very much unhelped a lot of people I have known. And I guess I really question whether this type of thing helps humanity as a whole.
I am firmly convinced these types of organizations often induce strange mental problems of their own which are often far worse than the sins they are trying to cure.... And I guess I really question whether this type of thing helps humanity as a whole.
I agree entirely. People well served by their community have little motivation to question it, but that doesn't mean that everyone would benefit from membership in that community, or even that the community is beneficial to society as a whole. I have many thoughts on the subject, and maybe one day I'll write more.
I started by creating my own product and consulting companies, and as my monetary needs increased and revenues decreased, kept them running on the back burner while adding full-time remote and in-office web development work. I consider myself very lucky to have met the people who could connect me to projects that didn't care so much about daily schedules, only results. And if I may say so, I definitely deliver results.
Maybe a lightweight proxy server (running a r-Pi? or another headless server) on your network and routing traffic through it? I offer this as an extension to my post many comments down, which basically covers my belief that you must first filter/proxy the mind. Not trying to control how to hand everything the world has available but instead only allowing yourself to focus on what you need available and saying no to the rest.
Anyways, it's bit of a time consumer setting up said software initially but you benefit from a lot of angles once done. (Network security, content management, less likely to back track on systems that take more work to implement, as well as having a sophisticated and global system across all devices routed through the proxy server.) I believe some software packages even allow for the management of access times as well as content type. White list only a couple sites/ url's / IP's you use and white list them for only the time you need to be able to use them. Have someone else change the computer password on the server that you trust and boom. Just don't get distracted trying to circumvent security now...ha ha
Just a casual suggestion based upon experience as a school system administrator. Normally though if I am having a problem that starts in the mind, I develop a solution that either starts there or starts at whatever triggers it in my mind. Just a thought. Hack yourself you know?
> So now I spend a lot of time on very strict information diets.
What helped me was signing up to newsletters. Once a week I get newsletters summarising the most interesting links for HN, and also ones about Python, Big Data and Data Science.
I redirect HN/Reddit/Facebook to 127.0.0.1 in my hosts file, because going to these sites is an automatic reaction in a browser, and all I need is a 404 to remind myself why I no longer visit them all day.
Lastly, I only use Facebook for chat but I get distracted by the feed. So I unfollowed everyone on my feed and now I don't have one.
I got the Internet as a birthday present on my 8th birthday, and pretty much disappeared from normal society for the next few years. The Internet was (and is) fascinating - I could learn anything, interact with people I'd never met with, and, notably, do adult things without anyone doubting me because I was young.
But as I got older, the Internet, and therefore my mind, just got busier. Eventually it was not only random articles and a few chatrooms, but dozens of apps and sites that are programmed to give us a dopamine hit. Being online to me feels like walking around in a casino trying not to gamble.
I don't think I concentrated on one thing for more than 20 minutes for years, and outside of school I didn't have to. So I just convinced myself that school was archaic, skipped as much class as I could, and ended up a mental butterfly. It was working for me.
Except for when I wanted to get stuff done. I probably started learning to program 100 times, but I would get distracted with cat pictures or something, and even though I loved computers more than anything else, I couldn't do much to create with them. I was diagnosed with ADHD, but I didn't really care; I don't think that experience is unique to either me or people who have been diagnosed with ADHD.
Then, all of the sudden, I went on a Mormon mission in eastern Ukraine. Two years with 30 minutes of Internet a week (at an Internet club 45 mins away from my apartment). My entire life was structured in a way I never would have structured it in order to get me to concentrate on the things I considered most important for that period of time.
My mind slowed down - in an almost literal sense. I had only finished a couple of books in my entire life before the mission, and on the mission I could easily read the Old Testament for hours on end, paying attention to intricacies of text I never would have realized before.
Then I got home. I jumped on Facebook, and right back into my old habits. My mind was gone for weeks. Not gone in the sense that I wasn't learning anything -- I would pick up tidbits here and there, but I never got deep enough into anything to make any of that learning useful. It terrified me.
So now I spend a lot of time on very strict information diets. I severely limit my time on HN, Reddit, Facebook. I try to keep my reading on a Kindle so the Internet isn't even an option. I would love for someone to create an app (that works) that limits what sites I can use so I can go into "wired in" mode when I'm programming.
In short, don't be afraid to place restrictions on yourself. Let your mind slow down.