{"id":1781,"date":"2008-05-19T20:43:16","date_gmt":"2008-05-20T01:43:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/martinepage.com\/blog\/2008\/05\/19\/how-distracting\/"},"modified":"2008-05-19T20:53:27","modified_gmt":"2008-05-20T01:53:27","slug":"how-distracting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.martinepage.com\/blog\/2008\/05\/19\/how-distracting\/","title":{"rendered":"How distracting"},"content":{"rendered":"
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It took me surprisingly long to realize how distracting the Internet had become, because the problem was intermittent. I ignored it the way you let yourself ignore a bug that only appears intermittently. When I was in the middle of a project, distractions weren’t really a problem. It was when I’d finished one project and was deciding what to do next that they always bit me.<\/p>\n

Another reason it was hard to notice the danger of this new type of distraction was that social customs hadn’t yet caught up with it. If I’d spent a whole morning sitting on a sofa watching TV, I’d have noticed very quickly. That’s a known danger sign, like drinking alone. But using the Internet still looked and felt a lot like work.<\/p>\n

Eventually, though, it became clear that the Internet had become so much more distracting that I had to start treating it differently. Basically, I had to add a new application to my list of known time sinks: Firefox.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Read the rest of this post titled Disconnecting Distraction<\/em> at Paul Graham’s Web site<\/a>. Thanks to Mare<\/a> for the link.<\/p>\n

When Karl<\/a> (on s’ennuie) was living in Montreal, he used to escape to the coffee shop at Chapters <\/a> on Sainte-Catherine every afternoon because they didn’t offer wifi. He claimed to have gotten a lot more work done this way, and I always admired him for his will power. (Then again, he might have substituted meeting women for using wifi, so I don’t know how much he actually got done by « isolating » himself in the bookstore ;-)<\/p>\n

Maybe I should do what Paul Graham suggests in his blog post. Maybe I should use my laptop for going online, and keep the iMac for offline work. I suspect it would drive me insane pretty quickly, but it’s worth a try, if only for a week.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It took me surprisingly long to realize how distracting the Internet had become, because the problem was intermittent. I ignored it the way you let yourself ignore a bug that only appears intermittently. When I was in the middle of a project, distractions weren’t really a problem. It was when I’d finished one project and… Continue reading How distracting<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[8,6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.martinepage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1781"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.martinepage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.martinepage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.martinepage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.martinepage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1781"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.martinepage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1781\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.martinepage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1781"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.martinepage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1781"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.martinepage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1781"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}