That's actually why I deleted my account. The constant anger about everything was just unnecessary in my life.

This comment thread hits the nail on the head for why I deactivated my social media.

But I haven't found a good alternative "productive" time waster for when my mind needs a short break.

> But I haven't found a good alternative "productive" time waster for when my mind needs a short break.

Hacker News? I mean, you posted this right here!

I spend more time on HN than on FB by a fair margin now. I probably need to start reigning it in... :P

Luckily, HN has a handy no-proscrastination feature! :)

Tell me more about this!

Copied & pasted from an old HN post:

There are three new fields in your profile, noprocrast, maxvisit, and minaway. (You can edit your profile by clicking on your username.) Noprocrast is turned off by default. If you turn it on by setting it to "yes," you'll only be allowed to visit the site for maxvisit minutes at a time, with gaps of minaway minutes in between. The defaults are 20 and 180, which would let you view the site for 20 minutes at a time, and then not allow you back in for 3 hours. You can override noprocrast if you want, in which case your visit clock starts over at zero.

I force myself to bounce between reading a book and working, the computer is mostly a tool to get work done / research things quickly now for me. It's super boring in the immediate but rewarding once you put the work in which is a stark contrast to constantly coding -> compiling and filling up that instant gratification meter.

I like to waste time on YouTube and Wikipedia. They're good idle browsing for autodidacts.

TIL I'm an autodidact and that I have a very similar tastes to nihonde :P

What's your process for finding good autodidactical content on YouTube? (I am building something very related to this space; I'm super curious about people's "workflows" for this.)

How to (whatever)

Works for me :-)

"When my mind needs a short break" sounds like you should give meditation a shot.

Yea, but for a lot of people who are just starting to get better at practicing mindfulness, it's not a 100% solution yet and you end up doing things like FB anyway, just more rarely. (I know that was the case for me at least)

I actually hadn't heard the term mindfulness. I think meditation is something I'll need to give a serious try with that in mind. I can see the possible benefits.

You're right on the latter part. But as of late I've gone to the extreme and deactivated all but Snapchat for social media. As well as using Cold Turkey and editing my hosts file's to keep me away from certain sites.

It's hacker news for me.

A nice book!