random anecdote in time management and life quality. Doesn’t exactly have obvious life lesson
I use Freedom.to to block lots of sites (I block LessWrong during the morning hours of each day so that I can focus on coding LessWrong :P).
Once a upon a time, I blocked the gaming news website, Rock/Paper/Shotgun, because it was too distracting.
But a little while later I found that there was a necessary niche in my life of “thing that I haven’t blocked on Freedom, that is sort of mindlessly entertaining enough that I can peruse it for awhile when I’m brain dead, but not so bottomlessly entertaining that it’ll consume too much of my time.” If I didn’t have such a site, I would find one.
If I didn’t have a standardized one, I would find one at random, and it’d be a bit of a crap shoot whether it was 5 minutes of eyes-glazed-skimming, or an hour of tabsplosioning.
The site I ended up settling on as my default blah-time was Kotaku, which was… basically RockPaperShotgun but worse. Gaming news that was sort of pointless and devoid of personality but juuuust over the threshold of “interesting enough that I actually wanted to read it.”
Which I thought about a bit and then decided I reflectively endorsed.
Meanwhile, while I could access RockPaperShotgun in the evenings… I didn’t, because, well, it wasn’t that important and I was trying to cut back on videogames anyway.
Two years later… I dunno I found myself sort of thinking “you know, I wish I was passively gaining more interesting videogame news.”
And… I unblocked RockPaperShotgun.
And I was surprised to notice
a) wow, most the content was actually interesting, tailored for the sorts of games I like, and written in a more entertaining voice
b) there were only a couple articles per day, whereas Kotaku used a vaguely facebook-like algorithm of “most of the articles are crap, but every few ones is a gem, which sort of gets me into a skinner-box that (I realized, in retrospect) probably had me reading _more_ than RPS did.
random anecdote in time management and life quality. Doesn’t exactly have obvious life lesson
I use Freedom.to to block lots of sites (I block LessWrong during the morning hours of each day so that I can focus on coding LessWrong :P).
Once a upon a time, I blocked the gaming news website, Rock/Paper/Shotgun, because it was too distracting.
But a little while later I found that there was a necessary niche in my life of “thing that I haven’t blocked on Freedom, that is sort of mindlessly entertaining enough that I can peruse it for awhile when I’m brain dead, but not so bottomlessly entertaining that it’ll consume too much of my time.” If I didn’t have such a site, I would find one.
If I didn’t have a standardized one, I would find one at random, and it’d be a bit of a crap shoot whether it was 5 minutes of eyes-glazed-skimming, or an hour of tabsplosioning.
The site I ended up settling on as my default blah-time was Kotaku, which was… basically RockPaperShotgun but worse. Gaming news that was sort of pointless and devoid of personality but juuuust over the threshold of “interesting enough that I actually wanted to read it.”
Which I thought about a bit and then decided I reflectively endorsed.
Meanwhile, while I could access RockPaperShotgun in the evenings… I didn’t, because, well, it wasn’t that important and I was trying to cut back on videogames anyway.
Two years later… I dunno I found myself sort of thinking “you know, I wish I was passively gaining more interesting videogame news.”
And… I unblocked RockPaperShotgun.
And I was surprised to notice
a) wow, most the content was actually interesting, tailored for the sorts of games I like, and written in a more entertaining voice
b) there were only a couple articles per day, whereas Kotaku used a vaguely facebook-like algorithm of “most of the articles are crap, but every few ones is a gem, which sort of gets me into a skinner-box that (I realized, in retrospect) probably had me reading _more_ than RPS did.