adamzerner

Fea­ture Re­quest: Self-im­posed Time Restrictions

• adamzerner 13 May 2019 21:22 UTC

  5 points

  on: Think­ing Fast and Hard

  This re­minds me of Cal New­port and his book Deep Work. He ar­gues for some­thing similar. He talks about how “think­ing hard” al­lows you to perform wildly bet­ter than those who don’t, and also that it is in­creas­ingly rare and valuable in our world.

• adamzerner 11 May 2019 0:47 UTC

  7 points

  on: Dis­in­cen­tives for par­ti­ci­pat­ing on LW/​AF

  Per­son­ally, here are two things that pre­vent me from par­ti­ci­pat­ing as much as I’d like that I sus­pect might ap­ply to oth­ers:

  1) In­ter­net addiction

  When­ever I post or com­ment, I can’t help but start check­ing in to see if I get any re­sponses rather ob­ses­sively. But I don’t want to be in that state, so some­times I with­hold from post­ing or com­ment­ing. And more gen­er­ally, be­ing on LW means be­ing on the in­ter­net, and for me, be­ing on the in­ter­net tempts me to pro­cras­ti­nate and do things I don’t ac­tu­ally want to be do­ing.

  2. Rel­a­tively high bar for participation

  If I’m go­ing to com­ment or post, I want to say some­thing use­ful. Which of­ten means spend­ing time and effort. a) I have a limited ca­pac­ity for this, and b) if I’m go­ing to be spend­ing time and effort, I find that I of­ten see it as more use­ful to ap­ply it el­se­where, like read­ing a text­book.

  With (b), not always though. There’s a lot of other times where I do feel that ap­ply­ing my time/​effort here on LW is the most use­ful place to ap­ply it.

• adamzerner 10 May 2019 18:32 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: romeostevensit's comment on: Tales From the Amer­i­can Med­i­cal System

  Gotcha. Maybe it could make sense to ap­ply it to di­a­bet­ics then.

• adamzerner 10 May 2019 17:44 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Scott Alexander's comment on: Tales From the Amer­i­can Med­i­cal System

  Thanks for chiming in. I was hop­ing to hear from a prac­tic­ing doc­tor.

  That all does make sense. A doc­tor re­quiring ap­point­ments for re­fills seems un­der­stand­able now. The sys­tem that forces them to do so doesn’t, but that’s a sep­a­rate is­sue.

• adamzerner 10 May 2019 17:23 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Korz's comment on: Tales From the Amer­i­can Med­i­cal System

  I would not be sur­prised if the doc­tor adopted a rule of “always dis­cuss treat­ment in per­son” as health is­sues of­ten are very emo­tional and pa­tients may be ill-informed

  Ah, that does seem plau­si­ble. Along with the hy­pothe­ses that he slop­pily ap­plies this to di­a­bet­ics who need in­sulin, and it sub­se­quently be­came an ego con­test.

  I won­der how the doc­tor would re­act if Zvi’s friend would point out his mo­ti­va­tion for keep­ing his sched­ule while ac­tively en­dors­ing the im­por­tance of his doc­tor’s opinion.

  I too sus­pect that the doc­tor would have re­sponded much bet­ter. I’ve been learn­ing more and more that when you give peo­ple an out that lets them main­tain their ego, they of­ten are happy to take it. The places where peo­ple get re­ally stub­born is when giv­ing in would com­pro­mise their ego.

  But of course, it’s 100% not ac­cept­able for a doc­tor to let their ego get in the way of life sav­ing medicine, and it is ex­tremely un­der­stand­able for some­one be­ing de­nied life sav­ing medicine to over­look all of this.

• adamzerner 10 May 2019 4:32 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Alexei's comment on: Tales From the Amer­i­can Med­i­cal System

  Why is it that they are like that?

• adamzerner 10 May 2019 2:50 UTC

  18 points

  in reply to: Dave Lindbergh's comment on: Tales From the Amer­i­can Med­i­cal System

  Gr­rrrrrrrrrrrr!!!!!!!!!!!

  I thought that was a pos­si­bil­ity but I didn’t think it was too likely.

  Don’t they have enough money already? I’ve always been con­fused about peo­ple who are already ex­tremely wealthy act­ing so greed­ily. Eg. CEOs. You already have a ton of money, the ex­tra money can’t mean that much to you be­cause of diminish­ing marginal util­ity stuff, why hurt other peo­ple in pur­suit of more? Is it that they com­pare them­selves to oth­ers around them and want to have more than their friends? Is the pur­suit of more just a habit?

• adamzerner 10 May 2019 2:16 UTC

  11 points

  in reply to: jimrandomh's comment on: Tales From the Amer­i­can Med­i­cal System

  Yeah, that all makes a lot of sense. Thanks for the re­ply.

  So now I’m find­ing my­self very cu­ri­ous as to what pos­si­bly could have been this doc­tors mo­ti­va­tion for act­ing this way. Why would he have such a strong prefer­ence to see the pa­tient so soon? And why would he be so re­luc­tant to give the pa­tient in­sulin in the mean­time?

  True mal­i­cious­ness and de­sire to cause harm seems un­likely, so what could it be?

  My first thought is some sort of twisted ego. “You don’t say no to me! I’m the doc­tor! I am the one who knows when I do and don’t need to see you!”

  That seems some­what plau­si­ble, but also seems to in­tro­duce other ques­tions. Why would the doc­tor want to see the pa­tient in the first place? More rev­enue? I guess that’s pos­si­ble but doesn’t seem likely to me. Maybe the pa­tient has other com­pli­ca­tions and the doc­tor cares about the pa­tient and wants to see the pa­tient more fre­quently to make sure they’re alright. That seems to con­tra­dict the sub­se­quent “you don’t get your life­sav­ing medicine un­less you listen to me” at­ti­tude, but I guess it could just be that ego is his stronger drive, or just that he’s in­con­sis­tent.

  Now that I think about it more, the thing that seems most likely to me ac­tu­ally is that the doc­tor may have come across a good(seem­ing) rea­son to have this policy in the past, and just fol­lows it blindly now. Idk though, what would that good rea­son even be?

• adamzerner 10 May 2019 1:43 UTC

  9 points

  on: Tales From the Amer­i­can Med­i­cal System

  I’m try­ing to steel­man and see if there’s a way for this situ­a­tion to make some amount of sense.

  • What hap­pens if you let pa­tients buy re­fills with­out a pre­scrip­tion? Would they con­sume too much of it? Would there be any sort of risk of them sel­l­ing the ex­cess to oth­ers? I wouldn’t think so for ei­ther of those ques­tions, but I know very lit­tle about this do­main.

  • Is there a med­i­cal rea­son why the doc­tor might not pre­scribe more in­sulin if he ex­am­ines the pa­tient and finds some­thing new? I know you’re say­ing that the an­swer is “no” and that he’ll need in­sulin re­gard­less, but per­haps there is some edge case. The med­i­cal sys­tem seems pretty ob­sessed with edge cases and cov­er­ing their asses. “Have a headache? Ok. Let’s just make sure that you don’t have a brain tu­mor or any­thing first.”

  • On that note, I won­der if the doc­tor is com­ing from a place of wor­ry­ing about cov­er­ing his ass and get­ting sued if he pre­scribes more in­sulin with­out the exam. Maybe he also knows that he’s go­ing to pre­scribe it re­gard­less, but legally, he needs to say that he ex­am­ined the pa­tient first in case the pa­tient has a weird re­ac­tion or some­thing and ends up su­ing him.

  Of course, this isn’t to ex­cuse the be­hav­ior. When we’re talk­ing about life and death, the sys­tem needs to have pro­to­cols in place to re­al­lyre­al­lyre­al­lyre­al­lyre­ally make sure that the death part doesn’t hap­pen.

  The doc­tor ac­cuses my friend of hav­ing a gun to his head. My friend points out this is a rather in­ter­est­ing choice of metaphor. One could say that the doc­tor has a gun to his head, in the form of deny­ing him ac­cess to life sav­ing medicine. And that the two do not seem re­motely com­pa­rable.

  What an amaz­ing re­ply.

• adamzerner 9 May 2019 4:43 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Elizabeth's comment on: How long can peo­ple be pro­duc­tive in [time pe­riod]?

  Cool! I’d love to hear what you find!

• adamzerner 8 May 2019 19:43 UTC

  22 points

  on: How long can peo­ple be pro­duc­tive in [time pe­riod]?

  Meta

  Note: I’m go­ing to be talk­ing about pro­duc­tivity in the sense of hard work. Eg. An­ders Eric­s­son’s idea of de­liber­ate prac­tice.

  It seems self-ev­i­dent that if you’re perform­ing busy­work like data en­try or clean­ing, you could be pro­duc­tive for way longer than four hours/​day.

  It also seems self-ev­i­dent that in do­ing some­thing in be­tween busy­work and hard work, you can still be pro­duc­tive for more than four hours/​day. For ex­am­ple, a calcu­lus stu­dent do­ing tons of prac­tice prob­lems, or an ex­pe­rienced web de­vel­oper build­ing a sim­ple sign up form.

  So then, it seems to make sense to me to deal with the ques­tion of hard work. Push­ing your­self to the edge of your com­fort zone, or per­haps slightly be­yond it. For ex­am­ple, mas­ter­ing a difficult new con­cept or skill.

  Of course, when we talk about hard vs easy work, we’re talk­ing about a spec­trum, so “hard work” re­ally refers to a gen­eral area in that spec­trum, not a sin­gle point. The an­swer to the ques­tion of how many pro­duc­tive hours you have in a day prob­a­bly de­pends a lit­tle bit on where ex­actly you are on that spec­trum, but get­ting into that nu­ance seems like some­thing more ap­pro­pri­ate for a differ­ent ques­tion. Here, it seems like it’s worth just group­ing “hard work” to­gether and treat­ing it as a sin­gle thing.

  ---

  Note: As jim­ran­domh men­tions, things like age, phys­i­cal health and mo­ti­va­tion prob­a­bly mat­ter, as do things like perfor­mance en­hanc­ing sub­stances or tech­niques. It seems to me like it’d make sense to ad­dress those things in differ­ent ques­tion though. Eg. here I think we can ask the ques­tion of how many pro­duc­tive hours a healthy in­di­vi­d­ual who isn’t do­ing any perfor­mance en­hanc­ing stuff has in a day. Then in a sep­a­rate ques­tion, we can ask how things like age and phys­i­cal health im­pact this num­ber. And in an­other sep­a­rate ques­tion, we can ask how things like perfor­mance en­hanc­ing sub­stances im­pact the num­ber.

  Answer

  After about an hour of googling around, I haven’t been able to find any of those high qual­ity stud­ies ei­ther. My im­pres­sion is that the “peo­ple are only pro­duc­tive for four hours/​day” idea largely comes from in­ter­view­ing suc­cess­ful peo­ple, as op­posed to rigor­ously mea­sur­ing their perfor­mance. If there were high qual­ity stud­ies that re­ally mea­sured perfor­mance, I’d ex­pect that they would be talked about more and eas­ier to find, so I take the fact that they’re hard to find as rea­son­ably strong ev­i­dence that they don’t re­ally ex­ist.

  It is in­ter­est­ing to note that across a wide range of ex­perts, in­clud­ing ath­letes, nov­el­ists, and mu­si­ci­ans, very few ap­pear to be able to en­gage in more than four or five hours of high con­cen­tra­tion and de­liber­ate prac­tice at a time.

  This quote comes from a Har­vard Busi­ness Re­view ar­ti­cle ti­tled The Mak­ing of an Ex­pert. The au­thors are K. An­ders Eric­s­son, Michael J. Pri­etula, and Ed­ward T. Cokely. I know that Eric­s­son is known as an au­thor­ity in the study of ex­pert perfor­mance; not sure about the other au­thors.

  The ar­ti­cle Why you should work 4 hours a day, ac­cord­ing to sci­ence also had some rele­vant ex­cerpts. The au­thor men­tions var­i­ous ex­am­ples of ex­perts re­port­ing that four hours/​day is their limit, and that in in­ter­view­ing peo­ple, this is the strong pat­tern.

  Dar­win:

  After his morn­ing walk and break­fast, Charles Dar­win was in his study by 8 a.m. and worked a steady hour and a half. At 9:30 he would read the morn­ing mail and write let­ters. At 10:30, Dar­win re­turned to more se­ri­ous work, some­times mov­ing to his aviary or green­house to con­duct ex­per­i­ments. By noon, he would de­clare, “I’ve done a good day’s work,” and set out on a long walk. When he re­turned af­ter an hour or more, Dar­win had lunch and an­swered more let­ters. At 3 p.m. he would re­tire for a nap; an hour later he would arise, take an­other walk, then re­turn to his study un­til 5:30, when he would join his wife and fam­ily for din­ner.

  Poin­caré:

  Toulouse noted that Poin­caré kept very reg­u­lar hours. He did his hard­est think­ing be­tween 10 a.m. and noon, and again be­tween 5 and 7 in the af­ter­noon. The 19th cen­tury’s most tow­er­ing math­e­mat­i­cal ge­nius worked just enough to get his mind around a prob­lem — about four hours a day.

  G.H. Hardy:

  G.H. Hardy, one of Bri­tain’s lead­ing math­e­mat­i­ci­ans in the first half of the 20th cen­tury, would start his day with a leisurely break­fast and close read­ing of the cricket scores, then from 9 to 1 would be im­mersed in math­e­mat­ics. After lunch he would be out again, walk­ing and play­ing ten­nis. “Four hours’ cre­ative work a day is about the limit for a math­e­mat­i­cian,” he told his friend and fel­low Oxford pro­fes­sor C.P. Snow.

  John Eden­sor Lit­tle­wood:

  Hardy’s long­time col­lab­o­ra­tor John Eden­sor Lit­tle­wood be­lieved that the “close con­cen­tra­tion” re­quired to do se­ri­ous work meant that a math­e­mat­i­cian could work “four hours a day or at most five, with breaks about ev­ery hour (for walks per­haps).”

  Eric­s­son’s study of vi­o­lin stu­dents:

  Add these sev­eral prac­tices up, and what do you get? About four hours a day. About the same amount of time Dar­win spent ev­ery day do­ing his hard­est work and Hardy and Lit­tle­wood spent do­ing math.

  This up­per limit, Eric­s­son con­cluded, is defined “not by available time, but by available [men­tal and phys­i­cal] re­sources for effort­ful prac­tice.”

  The ar­ti­cle also makes some more gen­eral state­ments about the four hours/​day idea:

  Dar­win is not the only fa­mous sci­en­tist who com­bined a lifelong ded­i­ca­tion to sci­ence with ap­par­ently short work­ing hours. We can see similar pat­terns in many oth­ers’ careers

  In par­tic­u­lar, it men­tions the fol­low­ing study:

  A sur­vey of sci­en­tists’ work­ing lives con­ducted in the early 1950s yielded re­sults in a similar range. Illinois In­sti­tute of Tech­nol­ogy psy­chol­ogy pro­fes­sors Ray­mond Van Zelst and Willard Kerr sur­veyed their col­leagues about their work habits and sched­ules, then graphed the num­ber of hours spent in the office against the num­ber of ar­ti­cles they pro­duced. You might ex­pect that the re­sult would be a straight line show­ing that the more hours sci­en­tists worked, the more ar­ti­cles they pub­lished. But it wasn’t.

  The data re­vealed an M-shaped curve. The curve rose steeply at first and peaked at be­tween 10 to 20 hours per week. The curve then turned down­ward. Scien­tists who spent 25 hours in the work­place were no more pro­duc­tive than those who spent five. Scien­tists work­ing 35 hours a week were half as pro­duc­tive as their 20-hours-a-week col­leagues.

  If you search through Cal New­port’s blog, you’ll find lots of other ex­am­ples of ex­pert perform­ers only be­ing able to man­age four hours/​day of hard work. John Gr­isham’s 15-Hour Work­week is one:

  Gr­isham pri­mar­ily writes his nov­els dur­ing the win­ter months on his farm in Oxford, Mis­sis­sippi. Dur­ing this pe­riod he works five days a week, start­ing at 7 am and typ­i­cally end­ing by 10 am.

  There is some­thing im­por­tant that I’d like to em­pha­size. From what I can tell, all of these ex­am­ples of ex­pert perform­ers who can only perform about four hours of hard work per day, these peo­ple all seem to be get­ting the other parts of the pro­duc­tivity equa­tion right. They’re sleep­ing enough, tak­ing naps, tak­ing walks, elimi­nat­ing dis­trac­tions, quit­ting Face­book, etc. So four hours/​day seems like it is con­di­tional on those things. I think that this is worth not­ing be­cause many of us are not get­ting those things right. I know I’m not.

• adamzerner 8 May 2019 17:49 UTC

  2 points

  on: How long can peo­ple be pro­duc­tive in [time pe­riod]?

  It seems worth clar­ify­ing what you mean by “pro­duc­tive”. As Rae­mon and wave­man men­tion, the an­swer will de­pend on whether you are talk­ing about “hard” work a la An­ders Eric­s­son’s idea of de­liber­ate prac­tice, or about more rou­tine type of work. I sus­pect that you are talk­ing about the former and that peo­ple will in­ter­pret it as the former, but it still seems worth clar­ify­ing.

  It also might be worth men­tion­ing that you are refer­ring to “stan­dard” cases of healthy in­di­vi­d­u­als who aren’t us­ing any perfor­mance en­hanc­ing drugs or any­thing like that. I took that as a given, as the ques­tion of how un­nat­u­ral things like that could change the de­fault seems like a differ­ent ques­tion, as does the ques­tion of how things like anx­iety or lack of sleep re­duce your ca­pac­ity.

• adamzerner 2 Mar 2019 6:51 UTC

  38 points

  on: Karma-Change Notifications

  I’m some­one who is re­ally wor­ried about ad­dic­tive­ness. I find my­self do­ing the com­pul­sive re­fresh­ing, and hate my­self more and more ev­ery time I find my­self do­ing it. This cou­pled with my just hav­ing finished read­ing Digi­tal Min­i­mal­ism made me feel re­ally wor­ried as I first started read­ing this post. But once I reached the point where I re­al­ized the team was aware of the prob­lem of ad­dic­tive­ness and gives users a way around it… I just felt a strong feel­ing of warmth to­wards LessWrong. hearts

• adamzerner 19 Jan 2019 3:34 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Meli's comment on: Some Thoughts on My Psy­chi­a­try Practice

  I definitely see what you’re say­ing about how we make com­par­i­sons when we pro­cess in­for­ma­tion, and that there is a strong evolu­tion­ary pres­sure for us to be con­cerned about so­cial sta­tus. The thing that makes me feel hope­ful is that when you look at hu­mans, there’s a pretty de­cent range of how much differ­ent peo­ple care about so­cial sta­tus. Some care a lot, some only care a lit­tle. I wouldn’t ar­gue if some­one were to claim that you can never 100% get rid of the con­cern for so­cial sta­tus, but it does re­ally seem to me that there is room for growth in terms of how much you care about it. Other­wise, what ex­plains the fact that there is a spec­trum of how much peo­ple care. Un­less it is all ge­netic, it seems that there is a lot of room for peo­ple to im­prove.

  I think that’s a re­ally cool idea about so­ciety mov­ing to­wards healthier com­par­i­sons. Without hav­ing thought deeply about it, my im­pres­sion is that it’d be ex­tremely difficult be­cause of equil­ibrium stuff. If an in­di­vi­d­ual ac­tor starts to pri­ori­tize some­thing like effort in­stead of ac­com­plish­ment, no one is go­ing to praise them, and they won’t get so­cial sta­tus points. It seems like some­thing where you’d need to get a siz­able group to all make a change at the same time, which is always tricky to do. Not to say that it isn’t worth pur­su­ing though.

• adamzerner 18 Jan 2019 23:58 UTC

  3 points

  on: Some Thoughts on My Psy­chi­a­try Practice

  There’s some­thing that I’ve always been cu­ri­ous about but never had the chance to ask: as a psy­chi­a­trist and psy­chol­o­gist, to what ex­tent has your train­ing helped you avoid or solve your own men­tal health prob­lems? How helpful has it been?

  My guess is that it is only some­what helpful. Many doc­tors smoke and eat un­healthy foods even though they’ve spent years study­ing just how harm­ful that stuff is. It seems to me that this is an area where “in­cre­men­tal im­prove­ments in ra­tio­nal­ity don’t always lead to in­cre­men­tal im­prove­ments in win­ning” is true.

• adamzerner 18 Jan 2019 23:46 UTC

  4 points

  on: Some Thoughts on My Psy­chi­a­try Practice

  I’ve been mean­ing to think more about ego and iden­tity. I also sense that a lot of peo­ple have prob­lems where they don’t feel ac­com­plished enough, and where they com­pare them­selves with other peo­ple. I know that I have those sorts of prob­lems.

  On the one hand, it seems silly to com­pare your­self to other peo­ple like that. Espe­cially when it is taken to such an ex­treme. But on the other hand, it seems like some­thing that is deeply in­grained in us, and that is very hard to avoid. In re­al­ity, that sort of think­ing is prob­a­bly es­tab­lish­ing a false di­chotomy. Clearly there are some peo­ple who are more in­vested in how ac­com­plished they are than oth­ers.

  The ques­tion that I’m in­ter­ested in is how to change your mind­set, such that you re­tain your am­bi­tion, but aren’t caught up in it, if that makes sense. Where you pur­sue im­prove­ment and ac­com­plish­ment ei­ther be­cause you are in­trin­si­cally mo­ti­vated to do so, or be­cause you want to do good for the world, but not be­cause you want so­cial sta­tus points. And where you see the ac­com­plish­ment as a “nice to have”, rather than an “I’m happy if I get it, and sad if I don’t”. And es­pe­cially not where you see it as a “I feel nor­mal if I get it, and de­pressed if I don’t”. I find for my­self, and sense that the same is true for many oth­ers, that a “log­i­cal” un­der­stand­ing of­ten isn’t enough, that your brain still may act as if it’s a ne­ces­sity rather than a nice to have, even though you log­i­cally un­der­stand that this mind­set is silly. I sup­pose that this is a much more gen­eral prob­lem, and a very im­por­tant one.

• adamzerner 21 Dec 2018 1:19 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Vaniver's comment on: You can be wrong about what you like, and you of­ten are

  In the ex­am­ple of TV vs. nov­els, no, but there are other ex­am­ples where I do think so:

  • Live-like-the-lo­cals va­ca­tion vs. tourist vacation

  • Do­ing home im­prove­ment stuff your­self vs. pay­ing some­one to do it for you

  • Bik­ing ev­ery­where vs. hav­ing a car

  On bal­ance, I’m ac­tu­ally not sure of what I think about whether “high class” things tend to provide more hap­piness than “low class” things, so I spoke too soon in the pre­vi­ous com­ment.

• adamzerner 20 Dec 2018 20:03 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: ricraz's comment on: You can be wrong about what you like, and you of­ten are

  I’m cu­ri­ous why you chose these par­tic­u­lar ex­am­ples.

  I wanted to think of bet­ter ones but was hav­ing trou­ble do­ing so, didn’t want to ded­i­cate the time to do­ing so, and figured that it would be bet­ter to sub­mit a mediocre ex­plo­ra­tory post about a topic that I think is im­por­tant than to not post any­thing at all.

  More gen­er­ally, whether or not you en­joy some­thing is differ­ent from whether that thing, in the fu­ture, will make you hap­pier. At points in this post you con­flate those two prop­er­ties.

  I agree, and I think it would have been a good thing to dis­cuss in the main post. “I know that I don’t like sal­ads now; I think I could de­velop a taste for them, but I don’t want to or can’t bring my­self to do so” is definitely a differ­ent thing than “I don’t like sal­ads now, so I’m not go­ing to eat them” and “I don’t like sal­ads now and I don’t think that I could ever like them”.

  By dis­cussing the above point, I think it would have the benefit of be­ing more clear about what ex­actly the prob­lem is. In par­tic­u­lar, that “I know that I don’t like sal­ads now; I think I could de­velop a taste for them, but I don’t want to or can’t bring my­self to do so” is a differ­ent prob­lem.

  The ex­am­ples also give me elitist vibes: the im­pli­ca­tion seems to be that up­per-class pur­suits are just bet­ter, and peo­ple who say they don’t like them are more likely to be wrong.

  I definitely don’t mean to im­ply that this is true. I per­son­ally don’t think that it is. But I do see how the ex­am­ples I chose would give off that vibe, and I think it would have been bet­ter to come up with ex­am­ples that demon­strate a wider range of “I know what I like” at­ti­tudes.

• adamzerner 20 Dec 2018 5:53 UTC

  16 points

  on: What self-help has helped you?

  In­ter­net blocks

  I use SelfCon­trol to block the en­tire in­ter­net for long pe­ri­ods of time. And I cou­ple this with Au­toSelfCon­trol to set sched­ules where it gets blocked au­to­mat­i­cally. Cur­rently, what I’ve been do­ing is block­ing the en­tire in­ter­net for all hours other than an “in­ter­net win­dow” of 5:00-5:30pm.

  I do this be­cause I find that the in­ter­net tempts me into us­ing my time poorly, in terms of pro­duc­tivity, and fun. My thoughts on this are largely in­spired by Cal New­port.

  It is worth not­ing that I am a web de­vel­oper, and I don’t re­ally find this the in­ter­net blocks all that in­con­ve­nient. In fact, I find that I am way more pro­duc­tive when I am work­ing with an in­ter­net block. Be­ing a web de­vel­oper seems like it’d be one of the most in­con­ve­nient pro­fes­sions for this ap­proach, so I imag­ine that if it works for me as a web de­vel­oper, there is a good chance that it could work for oth­ers.

  I use Dash for all of my offline doc­u­men­ta­tion. They also al­low you to in­clude GitHub re­pos and Stack­Overflow posts. Yes, it isn’t perfect. There are some times where I want to google around for a cer­tain ques­tion and can’t. But the down­sides aren’t that big a deal. I can just wait un­til my next in­ter­net win­dow, and I can ex­plic­itly change the Au­toSelfCon­trol sched­ule if I truly do need to. More im­por­tantly, I find that the up­sides re­ally out­weigh the down­sides.