Removing distractions by using Kindle instead of my phone

11:11 am

I’ve realised that my mind is no longer able to focus on specific tasks for more than 15 minutes. Back in school days and even in college, I used to read books for “hours” at a stretch. Forget COVID, I think “Dimnishing Attention Span” is a much bigger pandemic today. And the sad part is there’s no vaccine for it. People are addicted to dopamine and constant context switching. Even while scrolling through Youtube, I’ve found myself clicking less on longer videos, because I know I’ll get bored quickly.

I was discussing these things with my wife the other night; about the need to surgically remove the distracting elements embedded deep in our lives like cancer. And in addition to that engaging the mind in lesser number of things, so that the mind gets time to absorb in depth whatever it has consumed. Fortunately or unfortunately the type of distractions I have in my life are not Instagram or TikTok, they are movies, books and articles. Each morning when I wake up, I have this urgent craving to read something. So I pickup my phone, open Firefox and scroll through the first two pages of Hacker News and see if anything interesting has surfaced. If in case Hacker News fails, I switch to The Verge (I rarely find good stuff there) and after that I get lost somewhere in Reddit’s feed. And after that first switch from Hacker News, I start feeling guilty about using my phone as I pick sleep out of my eyes and shift uncomfortably on the toilet seat. I just hate the idea of myself picking up my phone first thing in the morning. I’d feel much less guilty if I pick up my kindle instead (sheepish grin).

I came across this awesome CLI app Kindle Send which lets me send webpages to my kindle. So I’ve loaded a bunch of Paul Graham essays and some other good stuff. Will update my thoughts about this once this process is established into my daily routine.

1:14 pm

I’m trying to create a shortcut on my iPhone which I can run to invoke a script through SSH on my raspberry pi, which in turn would invoke the Kindle Send CLI app to send webpage of the URLs that I copy on my phone directly to my kindle.

11:50 pm

Finally done! Not that I was working on it since noon. I spent maybe a couple of hours late in the evening trying to make it work. It involved cloning the Kindle Send project’s code, understanding make & Makefile, trying to compile it for Raspberry PI, learning how to SCP files from one machine to another and then smoothening out the end to end experience of saving stuff on my kindle at the click of a button on my phone.

Applied coding after a really long time to iron out a personal inconvenience. Things like this make me remember why I fell in love with coding in the first place.