litany against fear
Turning off the Firehose
I recently came across this post about a user who decided he had enough of the user-generated news community, Reddit. I’ve been a Reddit user for a quite some time now, and I’ve done my share of down voting Ron Paul stories as well submitting silly pictures that have made it onto the front page. Lately though, it’s become more than a habit to check this site. I have a very compulsive personality, and I tend to find some sort of deep and intensive joy in small, minute improvements and changes. I know this is the reason why over 70 days of my life were wasted on World of Warcraft, and I’m pretty sure it’s the reason why I find programming so fun. Most people would be frustrated by missing a semi-colon and be absolutely stumped by the quest for perfection that compilers demand, but to me it’s another challenge, another hurdle I know I can overcome. It’s also the reason why some days I’d refresh Reddit every 5 to 10 minutes to see if my karma had changed.
Reddit has been sucking up way too much of my time during the day, and I’ve decided to put an end to it. All I did was block it through my hosts file to redirect to 127.0.0.1, which works out well since during my work time it directs me to the website that I’m developing.
So, I’m turning off the firehose. I will probably end up blocking Digg and Slashdot as well, and I need to set up Google Reader for my favorite blogs. Yeah, this means I’ll sacrifice that information intake that my brain is used to, but I feel that time could be used to read the several books I have lying around my room, be it Code Complete or the Mythical Man-Month. My guitar is also gathering plenty of dust, and I have a few side projects that I could be working on as well. Here’s to less distractions! Do you have distractions that you could probably do without?