The internet itself is neutral, only gives high leverage to your actions. Feeling like procrastinating? It'll get multiplied 100-fold. Searching for something useful? It'll get multiplied as well.
The problem lies more in this sequence of events
1. Searching for something useful
2. Page takes a while to load
3. Better use this opportunity to check HackerNews (or whatever)
4. Waste 10 minutes
5. Oh yeah, that site already loaded.
Re:Non-blocking Programmers
by danohuiginn on Thursday March 31, 2011 @08:56AM
(#2391324)
good point on the page-load thing. I wonder if some small technical tweaks could substantially change our behaviour here. Something like automatically flipping back to whatever page you were waiting for, as soon as it's finished loading.
To a degree, that can be fixed behaviorally. I tend to open outgoing links in background and continue reading the current document. Once I'm done with current document, I'll close tab and a fresh tab with (hopefully) already loaded content will slide in.
For example, a quick glance over HN's main page, followed by opening interesting stuff in background, followed by closing the main page.
Doesn't work too well with footnotes, thou.
Sure, it took a few seconds to jump through my RSS reader, yep, it took a bit of time to read it because it's an interesting article, and obviously, I am now here, writing this comment and thinking whether I should inflict the link on my twitter followers, perhaps even on facebook.
And then the coup de grâce at the end of the article itself
> There are other factors relating to flow which can be optimized. For example one can block off chunks of time
Well oops?
In general, the internet sucks for productivity, but at the same time it's really really hard to code without it.