Comment by gofreddygo
3 days ago
> This stops working after a while.
yeah and i figured thats fine !
I take time spent on HN as an example. I used to think if i limit my HN time to under 10-15 mins a day, would be ideal. But the slippery slope was stopping. It felt rude. And i had no one but myself to get angry on. Weird loop.
I then go the opposite, allow myself to binge. Kinda forced looking at HN every occasion i had a few mins. I get bookmakes to avoid typing the url. Browse on every device. Add comments, browse past lists, front page, best comments, etc. All the dopamine boosts. And I notice the dopamine effect reduces. The fun in comments, upvotes and finding something new just evaporates. A day or two of this makes me sick of the orange banner and the beige background. I delete bookmarks, remove everything. Make a new account to start fresh. Add a rule to block the domain, all out of a natural reaction, mind you.
i dont have real stats but it feels like over 2 years of this, i've spent less time on HN, than before. I'm not constantly fighting myself. It comes and goes in waves, like seasons of nature. Right now its spring and slowly getting into HN summer as explained by my flurry of comments past few weeks.
Pretty sure my commenting pattern is similar. I write a bunch of comments in a short period then none at all and just lurk for a while. All the HN comment data is published, right? (BigQuery?) I wonder if we can find cyclic comment patterns for individual users. It might be harder to find patterns if the user creates a new account every cycle like parent, but maybe just users that have been active for 2+ years.
That’s also occurs with me, but in games! Sometimes, I feel “obligated” to play, the urge of playing that unique game, then suddenly, it disappears.
I’m not a psychologist, but I believe that occurs often, some things just lose that sparkle with the time, and it’s okay, you just need to find a new way to make your task. This article is a good example of how you can do this, and, with some time, change your methods!
I believe that having urges come and go is the natural way human motivation works. Doing something every day, whether you feel like doing it or not, is the artificial thing that you need to be trained to do.
Some things require larger blocks of time. For example, you need several days in line to take a vacation; you can't simply take "5 minutes of vacation" every day. Some things are done much better if you dedicate an entire day, or at least a few consecutive hours to them: whether it is learning something new, writing a blog article, relaxing, hanging out with your friends, etc.
It would be more natural to work 16 hours a day when you feel like it, and then take a day off.
My approach is to gather HN articles via RSS (then convert to maildir) a couple of times a day. That has two effects:
- It reduces the subconscious slot-machine mechanic (compared to refreshing a Web page) since I know there won't be anything new in my feed for the next several hours.
- There are also tangible benefits to using a proper feed reader, like only seeing unread items. That also discourages "cheating", since reading things outside of my feeds will require me to mark them as "read" after the next update.
I receive comment-replies via email, filtered into an IMAP folder that refreshes a bit faster than the RSS feed, to allow conversations.
These don't have notifications, but if I'm in the mail reader I can see their unread count (usually zero; and hence can be dismissed with a glance)