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Bad Loops

A bad loop might be "10 open up reddit, read all the posts, close reddit, open hacker news, read all the posts, close hacker news, GOTO 10". Sure, you might learn a few things, and put even more things into the ever-growing list of things to get to, but then where did the day go? Where were the other things you wanted to do?

It could be worse.

xkcd://386

There are various fixes, mostly involving discipline. (Awww, man!) Lacking that one might try various technological fixes, such as:

Aggregate postings somewhere and read through them only at a certain time.
Firewall off the problematic hosts, or 127.0.0.1 them in /etc/hosts, etc.
Only fetch emails during daylight hours on weekdays. Once per hour.
Set a limit on how frequently a command can be run.
Close a program after a certain amount of time.

Non-technological fixes might involve going for a walk, tending to overly aggressive blackberry vines, that sort of thing. Or, to turn off the computers over the weekend. (Awww, man!)

Not Before

Here we use a hypothetical notbefore script that accepts a label and a duration; the script exits zero (okay) only when sufficient time has passed since the last successful run for that label. Then, only five minutes of reading time is granted by timeout; this will encourage a skim for interesting discussions and to save any longer articles for a deeper review. Maybe when you are offline. Session got killed? Too bad! Be faster next time.

    #!/bin/sh
    notbefore hackernews 86400 && \
    exec timeout 5m w3m https://news.ycombinator.com/

A more complicated notbefore might do different things on the weekend or according to certain calendar days, phase of the moon, etc. August could be a month of no tech news, for example.

Aggregator

gemini://warmedal.se/~antenna/

Instead of actually visiting the link, one might write a script that finds unseen links and posts them somewhere for review, perhaps into your mailbox, or maybe a summary page on a local gemini server. Then you need not actually visit the feed, and can instead review the new links as they show up somewhere in your workflow. The workflow could be gated with notbefore so that portion can only happen so often, perhaps also with some time limit on the session.

I use a mailbox here as it is quite easy to drop raw gemtext into a maildir directory, provided you forge a suitable mail header, and mutt makes it very easy to 'd'elete messages. Other workflows are possible.

Or you could use an existing Atom/RSS aggregator thingy, but you would have to find one, one that might come with snakes—why did it have to be snakes?—and may not do exactly what you want.

Basis

Blueberries are not available year-round; nor do salmon run every day. Night turns into day, despite the best efforts of some to chase it away. Here we have feast and famine. Therefore we replicate these natural cycles and limit when and for how long we have access to a resource. Always on trends towards the Seneca cliff of burnout.

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