It's even worse in university libraries, where you can actually follow up all the references by grabbing them off the shelf. The number of books piled up around you with post-it notes marking pages is roughly like the number-of-tabs metric...

If you want to read a book, just get off the computer and read a book.

I had no internet in my apt for a few months, and it was also right after I had moved to a new city (it was semi-accidental, due to bullshit with a "pre-wired for ethernet" apartment that I took way longer to give up on than I should have). The mixture of having no internet and not much else in the apt was interesting. It was easier to unwind at the end of the day; go home, cook, read a magazine or book, go to bed. There just wasn't enough in the house to keep me up.

It's true that when you have the internet, with all the information and possibilities, it's like I have both an entire library and an entire workshop always available to me. And how am I going to go to sleep in the middle of all that? But I think it was also important I didn't have much else in my apartment at the time; if I had had a bunch of dead-tree encyclopedias, novels, magazines, etc., I would've just read those.

Has anything less drastic been tried? Like, for example, making Internet access only available to one computer in the household?

If one believes that home Internet access is a bad value proposition I could see that, I guess, but this is such a foreign view point that I don't see how I could have anything to add.

Books? I have a Kindle. TV? I don't have cable, I subscribe to Netflix and Hulu+. Cooking? I find many recipes online. Purchasing things? I buy a lot on Amazon. Keeping in touch with friends? Email, gchat, IRC, facebook, etc.

The Internet isn't a product. It isn't even a technology. It's an efficient overlay communication network. If you communicate with the outside world it can make everything you do better. If one doesn't, then maybe one has no purpose for it but then I have no purpose for that viewpoint because that life doesn't even exist to me.

Actually, willpower is a limited resource:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self_control#As_a_limited_resou...

The people who make the best use of it shape their environments to avoid temptation:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/05/18/090518fa_fact_...

Exactly as this person did.

I stand by my claim that the fundamental problem that the author has is not with the Internet, it's with their willpower.

I read the same article as you many years ago when it was first published.

My conclusion, however, was different from yours. You seem to have stopped at "manipulate your environment to change how you behave." I preferred the conclusion, "manipulate your environment to change how you think." When I have distraction problems with the Internet I'll restructure my environment to provide gratification in different ways. If Internet browsing is rewarding to me to the point where it causes a distraction it now becomes an effective reward mechanism. I can make a schedule wherein a certain amount of work is rewarded with a small amount of Hacker News.

Moreover, the entire Internet isn't to blame for this person's problem, only a certain set of behavior on the Internet. They describe how slower or less rich internet didn't present a distraction. Why not cap their connection speed or disable images, javascript, and sound?

I see many options and "get rid of the Internet" seems the most naive and harmful in this case.

"Just read a book" isn't a solution at all. It doesn't work, and it displays willful ignorance of how willpower works.

I'm glad to see you have now responded with some more nuanced notions, but your arrogant "duh, he's doing it wrong" tone still grates. In particular, you assume that he couldn't possibly have thought about the issues you raise. Maybe if you started with the assumption that he has considered them you'd get someplace more interesting.

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If you want to read a book, you take a book, open it, and begin reading.

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If you're still having trouble reading it, maybe you don't actually want to read it as much as you are telling yourself you do. Be honest with yourself, listen to yourself, and don't force yourself to be something you're not. If you can't find some psychological lever to help you begin learning to code, or learn French, or to stop playing WOW - something important in your life which makes you want to do this - maybe you should step back and reexamine your life and priorities.

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Reading a book shouldn't drain one's willpower; if it is you're doing it wrong.

Also, it sounds like he really does want to do the book reading, in that's what he went and did once he was less distracted. And then tried an experiment to see how he could bring back more of that.

Also, your "it's just that simple" line is contradicted by a lot of research on willpower. (Which, hint hint, I linked.) Maybe it really works that way for you, in which case: bravo, you magnificent alien. But it doesn't work that way for most people, including the the author of the initial article.

Some books are easy books. Other books are hard, but worth the work. Some things are quick and easy gratification, but other only pay off after a while. For humans, at least, one has to set aside the former if you want to pursue the latter.

Age may not bring wisdom, but it does mean more experience. In this case, the experience of thinking that something is utterly simple, having your ass handed to you, and being forced to recognize that apparently simple things are often fiendishly subtle.

"I don't have home internet" is more of a stand-in for "Removing the distraction of the internet is a working form of self control for me" than for "I don't have self control".

[1]: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=willpower+limited+resour...

If you want to read a book, just get off the computer and read a book.

Really? I guess I'll "just" stop all my bad habits and replace them with good habits as well, shall I? And I'll "just" stop playing wrong notes on the piano too. Because, y'know, there's no reason I'm playing wrong notes, is there? There's no reason I have bad habits continuing year on year, there's no reason he's spending too much time on the internet, no complex interplay of a lifetime of biological, neurological and psychological drives and feedbacks, right? Humans are simple. That's why there are no problems in the world and everyone "just" is the ideal person they want to be.

Nobody is saying that it's easy to avoid internet distraction while using the internet. But it is easy to block out a few hours of not using the internet even if you are paying for a connection. It's quite similar to not going to a coffee shop for the same few hours.

To use the internet at the cafe, I have to put on my shoes, my coat, walk 5 minutes, buy a coffee, sit down, open my computer, etc.

It's not hard to do any of that. But it's a lot more effort than pulling my phone out of my pocket.

It's one of the main reasons I find value in having an office, and it is a non-trivial (though, thankfully, subway-based) commute away.

I addressed that rather simply, I thought. It seems that his biggest problem with the Internet was that it was too easily accessible. Not having Internet is a very obdurate way of approaching this, in my opinion. Note that most of the things the writer did as an alternative were not on the computer. Instead of separating the Internet from their computer, I simply suggested separating themselves from the computer.

Sometimes. Sometimes I'm doing one thing and focusing on it.

> Quick, how many tabs do you have open right now?

Not the greatest metric. When I'm working, I often have like seven tabs open, all about what I'm focused on working on. So why would we assume that "number of tabs" is a better indicator of unfocus when discussing leisure time?