Pushing a couple of blogs to Feedly instead of manually checking them has massively reduced the time I spend mindlessly checking the sites, so that is a win. Instead I check Feedly, browse through the titles and read what interests me from time to time. It might be because there is a backlog of blog posts and I manually have to sift through the titles to find those that really interest me. In any case the payoff seems to be much more leveled and thus not as stimulating to the seeking system.
But the win is completely offset by spending the now freed up time browing Lesswrong and Reddit, netting me the same amount of wasted times and useless drivel. It seems like I’ll have to find a way to filter the interesting things from those two sites. For LessWrong it will have to be something that notifies me at fixed times whether an interesting discussion has new posts, especially since most of the interesting conversations seem to happen in the comments of the open thread. For Reddit I might make the radical decision to cut it out completely.
Pushing a couple of blogs to Feedly instead of manually checking them has massively reduced the time I spend mindlessly checking the sites, so that is a win. Instead I check Feedly, browse through the titles and read what interests me from time to time. It might be because there is a backlog of blog posts and I manually have to sift through the titles to find those that really interest me. In any case the payoff seems to be much more leveled and thus not as stimulating to the seeking system.
But the win is completely offset by spending the now freed up time browing Lesswrong and Reddit, netting me the same amount of wasted times and useless drivel. It seems like I’ll have to find a way to filter the interesting things from those two sites. For LessWrong it will have to be something that notifies me at fixed times whether an interesting discussion has new posts, especially since most of the interesting conversations seem to happen in the comments of the open thread. For Reddit I might make the radical decision to cut it out completely.
Your win isn’t completely offset—you spend more of your time on consuming content and less on fruitless search.