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ThunderPeel2001

Confessions of an Internet Eater

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I woke up this morning at 8.30, and having nothing to do, soon found myself just "looking a few things up on the Internet". It's now two hours later, and my plans of stopping, getting a shower, and going out to buy some much needed supplies have not come fruition.

This happens a lot.

When I'm away from the Internet, I feel good -- great even. I'm much more productive and feel more in control of my life.

For example: Last year my Internet connection went down for two weeks. While it was mildly annoying at times, it was largely an enjoyable time for me. I used my local Internet cafe for catching up with things when I needed to, and as it turned out, half an hour a week was all that I needed. I vowed to myself that I would keep this new regime when the Internet came back on. That lasted about a day.

I often go to bed late because I've become "stuck" searching, reading, posting things on the Internet. And I hate it! I hate waking up feeling like shit because I couldn't go to bed when I wanted to.

I even attached a timer to my router so it automatically shuts off at a reasonable hour... But I slowly find "legitimate" times when I need the Internet late at night, and then it gets pushed back and back.

I am the internet's bitch.

I'm posting this here to try and help myself become more aware of my problem. Of this psychological addiction. To confront it in my self, acknowledge it, and learn more about it. Hopefully it's the First Step.

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Same thing happens to me.

I used to find myself stuck in a loop with certain sites, from social networking to blogs. A set of them can generate content and links fast enough that by the time I'm done with one round of tabs, another is ready to open up and eat an hour. This Chrome plugin, inspired by the alt text on this XKCD, solved that problem. If I find a site becoming an unproductive time sink, on the list it goes.

I also sleep far better if I don't watch stuff on iPlayer/4od/netflix last thing at night, or allow my laptop anywhere near bed. I'm terrible when it comes to discipline on that though, and first thing, it's so tempting to reach for the internet instead of getting ready.

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I do this as well. The internet's ability to generate content together with my low standards and lack of self-control has turned my life into an endless, tasteless, nutritionless sausage of factoids, funny video clips, short blog posts and webisodes. It will never end.

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Yes. I have to actively pull myself away from the computer to start doing useful things. I think this is a common problem, especially if most of your actual work happens behind a computer screen. It's easy to just stick behind the screen all day and hang around forums or browse news sites, and get angry when there's nothing new anymore.

The few times I found myself without internet were always delightful. Scary thought.

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I always get to like 9pm and get really annoyed that I've not done enough work, and then stay up til like 2am catching up. It's fucking annoying.

When I don't have an internet connection I actually get a tonne of work done, but am really bored and annoyed about it the whole day.

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This happens to me too, but weirdly only at home. My room is like a black hole of productivity, sucking it all into nothing. Anywhere else, not a problem. I imagine it could spread if I got a laptop, part of why I don't get one. Otherwise I'm just browsing stuff on my phone, which somehow never cuts into anything I may need to do outside of my house. Also related, I've gone to the point of uninstalling all my games temporarily so I have less distraction from school stuff.

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This used to happen to me like crazy. It's calmed down a lot in recent years, though. I often get the twitchy feeling that I should pull out a device and look at something, but then I realize there's nothing I actually want to look at.

Of course, I do spend a ton of time on the internet on the whole, but it's mostly at work. :ph34r: It just doesn't keep me up into late hours anymore.

I wish I knew why the urge has waned so I could give some advice.

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Once they have an internet connection, computers are inherently distracting.

A few months ago, I caught myself about to pay for wifi on a two hour train journey, then realised that though I needed to keep checking my work email, I had a bunch of offline work to do too. I didn't bother with the wifi and used my phone for work email, and it was a really productive train journey. The extra awkwardness of the mobile interface stopped me from spending any more time than necessary online.

I think wrangling internet usage is a huge feat of understanding how you're likely to behave, though a major factor in my getting on top of it, as well as tools like that browser plugin, was years of getting to work from home, slowly becoming familiar with the dread of not having got enough work done.

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Oh yes, I know that feeling. And I still tend to go to bed late, every once in a while flipping my sleep schedule to something more healthy so I can screw it up again. For some reason it has gotten a lot easier for me to set aside distractions, but I don't know exactly when that change happened or why.

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Ditto. I keep thinking the problem would be solved with a better RSS utility, something that wouldn't present all that content in a level playing field, with count of unread posts, but that would let certain fast-updating things expire and sometimes keep track of just whether the site updated or not and send you to the last unread post (say for web comics for example).

Ugh. Whenever I start down that rabbit hole I remember Slavoj Žižek's observation about American attitude towards discipline: chocolate-flavored laxatives. The solution to your constipation is not to moderate your chocolate intake, but to eat more of this new and improved kind of chocolate...

All of those toys that are supposed to cut off the internet are generally impossible to implement in my case—since everything I do needs internet to work/is the internet. Maybe I can dupe Hobo Lobo into local staging, unplug the internet, and work that way. Hmm...

Anyway, yeah, fuck the internet. And fuck social media, the most horrible of internet drugs. I kinda feel like old-timey forums that focus on some kind of common interest of a community (e.g. this one) are a lot healthier than monolithic centralized clearinghouses of status updates, but I have yet to really figure out my take on all that.

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Interestingly, taking my general internet reading habits away from my computer entirely has largely vanquished this problem for me. I used to keep tabs on an enormous number of shit through Google Reader and some bookmarks, and just wasted so much time reading stuff it was kind of stupid and I felt like I'd wasted my time in the end.

So now, I only check my feeds when I otherwise have nothing to do (public transport, shitting, etc). And even better, I use an app called Readability where you can toss the stuff you actually want to read later — so I basically dive through my RSS feed and anything I think I'll want to read in detail I'll just throw into the reading list. Then when I have time I'll read it, knowing it's not going anywhere. I read through from oldest to newest, although naturally I never reach the end.

I've found through doing this I'm less obsessive about making sure I've seen everything on every site I follow. In fact, more often than not I just rely on my 'RSS' app (Flipboard)'s top picks alongside a few choice sites I absolutely must follow. After at least a year of this I've realised that a lot of the shit I follow I just don't care that much about, and now it's been so long since I kept an eye on them the compulsion to not miss anything has subsided completely.

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All of those toys that are supposed to cut off the internet are generally impossible to implement in my case—since everything I do needs internet to work/is the internet. Maybe I can dupe Hobo Lobo into local staging, unplug the internet, and work that way. Hmm...

Same here. It drives me crazy. I really wish I could figure out a job that I can do that isn't so dependent on being online.

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UFYH sends out a daily "get the hell off the internet and go to bed" post which pops up in my Google Reader and reminds me to go the hell to bed.

At work, in my downtime, I can never find anything to do on the internet. Once I get home, though, it's like some sort of... floodgate.

responsibility6.png

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I have an exam tomorrow but I also finished Cloud Atlas today and wanted to read the threads that I'd been holding off on. Cue and hour later and I still have yet to crack my textbook.

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Guuuys, you're making me feel terrible about my own procrastination techniques. Where else can I hide from the burdens of grad school with such efficacy?

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I am currently sitting here reading this stupid forum rather than going out and meeting up with friends.

Bah. That's the worst, IMO. I've found myself skipping things occasionally, but the internet should never take precedence over Real Life™.

So now, I only check my feeds when I otherwise have nothing to do (public transport, shitting, etc). And even better, I use an app called Readability where you can toss the stuff you actually want to read later — so I basically dive through my RSS feed and anything I think I'll want to read in detail I'll just throw into the reading list. Then when I have time I'll read it, knowing it's not going anywhere. I read through from oldest to newest, although naturally I never reach the end.

Maybe these sort of strategies don't go deep enough for me. Like it's possibly another tactic to avoid a deeper problem, but I'm intrigued about this app you mention. Link?

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Here you go: http://www.readability.com/

Clearly it can be used on a PC, but it's at its best on a phone or tablet because it just makes the reading experience very smooth. You can add links to it manually, but it's at its best when used with an interoperating app (MobileRSS and Flipboard are my choices, the former uses Google Reader's API and the latter basically finds and elegantly shows the kind of things you might like to read and is a good app in its own right) so you can just go through your feeds and chuck content into it for later enjoyment.

My old way of working was to go through my RSS feeds post by post, reading them as I went along. This just took up so much time and I always felt totally overwhelmed because I got through hardly anything during each session. The whole 'whiz through and sort them into read/reject piles' workflow is just so much better for me.

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I use Readability a ton. Highly recommended. You can get a bookmarklet and a browser add-on as well. If if bugs you for an account check BugMeNot.

Just by making things easier to read, it doesn't really help you decrease your Internet time though. You have to pair it with something - like using the Readability app, or Pocket (used to be "Read It Later") or Instapaper - to filter out things you really want to read into a separate bucket, and dunk you head only into that bucket rather than the whole river. The river has carp and pike that will take your nose clean off.

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