Top all-time · #23697
Chris V. Nicholson
Personal blog · vonnik.substack.comphilosophyhistoryproductivity
Chris V. Nicholson writes Vonnik’s Newsletter, a personal blog at vonnik.substack.com about philosophy, history and productivity. Since 2020, 3 different Hacker News readers have linked it 21 times. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-05-28, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (7) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Chris V. Nicholson's Substack for its posts on focus, energy, burnout, habits and managing device and app use. Commenters cite these posts as background for their own points.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 7 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Tech, History, and Big Ideas. More pragma than dogma. Click to read Vonnik’s Newsletter, by Chris V. Nicholson,
Most-linked posts?
- /p/how-to-take-your-brain-back2 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2024-10-13
- /p/a-few-ideas-that-made-my-life-better2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-10-15
What Hacker News says?
Totally agree with this and would add that cognitive load is not just a matter of the code before you, but a function of your total digital environment: https://vonnik.substack.com/p/how-to-take-your-brain-back Interruptions and distractions leave a cognitive residue that drastically reduces working memory through the Zeigarnik effect.
Comment linking /p/how-to-take-your-brain-back
on “Cognitive load is what matters”Submitted The Inner Game of Knowledge Work as a story · 4 points
HN discussionThere are a bunch of different ways. The best nootropic is sleep, the second-best is exercise. https://vonnik.substack.com/p/a-few-ideas-that-made-my-life-... Another good thing to do is block out the energy-suckers; ie distractions, especially the screen-based ones.
Comment linking /p/a-few-ideas-that-made-my-life-better
on “The quiet art of attention”Submitted Open-Source Realpolitik as a story · 2 points
HN discussionCognitive control is one of the most important issues of our era, IMHO: https://vonnik.substack.com/p/how-to-take-your-brain-back There are many techniques to increase our CC. The ADHD community is a trailblazer in this respect.
Comment linking /p/how-to-take-your-brain-back
on “The quiet art of attention”Submitted How to Fight Distraction (In a Crazy News Cycle) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionpersonal theory: burnout is basically when you're expending more energy than than you're able to recover during rest -- over chronic timelines. that is, i think getting physical health right addresses many causes of burnout. getting your device and app use right addresses a set of others. finding ways to connect with your team, users, company mission addresses other potential problems; ie feeling alienated and on a…
Comment linking /p/state-changes-work-and-presence
on “The Burnout Machine”For me, what this post illustrates most is the cost of information. By making hasty decisions, buyers are trading present time that might be spent shopping and comparing with future time spent struggling with the wrong product. They're discounting future time. But they're also doing something very rational -- they're making a decision to see what happens. That is, they're testing a hypothesis in the only way the mar…
Comment linking /p/the-expert-layman-problem
on “Why is it so hard to buy things that work well? (2022)”"Reading and writing more" are just aspirations. Those don't translate well to new behaviors. BJ Fogg (Stanford prof, behavioral scientist) lays out how to build new behaviors in Tiny Habits. You need to make them easy and attach the easy thing to something you already do regularly. (When I sit down to lunch, I read one page...) https://tinyhabits.com/ Secondly, your mind is interfering with its own work. Tim Gallwe…
Comment linking /p/a-few-ideas-that-made-my-life-better
on “Procrastination and the fear of not being good enough”I burned out bad running a startup and shutting it down during Covid. I managed to recover since then. There are lots of causal factors leading to burnout. It’s basically a long term energy imbalance along multiple dimensions. One of those dimensions is attentional fatigue caused by our messy digital environment: https://vonnik.substack.com/p/how-to-take-your-brain-back But there are other factors that feed into it:…
Comment linking /p/how-to-take-your-brain-back
on “The Tsunami of Burnout Few See”I went thru the author’s struggle, too. Here’s what I came with: https://vonnik.substack.com/p/how-to-take-your-brain-back
Comment linking /p/how-to-take-your-brain-back
on “My Struggle with Doom Scrolling”I’m a big believer in learning tied to projects and goals, at least for the consumption that the author is describing. It usually feeds back into building, which feeds back into learning. But more broadly, it comes down to where you draw the line and call content distraction, and what you do about digital distractions. https://vonnik.substack.com/p/how-to-take-your-brain-back
Comment linking /p/how-to-take-your-brain-back
on “Digital consumption keeps me from getting better at my job”I think the point is that people focus too much on the tech solution and not enough on the system into which the tech solution will be introduced. There's this idea of "problem holder" that Walt Beleyer at Sandia National Laboratory talks about. Holding the problem and deeply understanding is sometimes neglected in the rush and joy of building. Fwiw, I wrote a post about that here: https://vonnik.substack.com/p/a-bu…
Comment linking /p/a-building-complex
on “Move fast, but understand the problem first”This is true. Focus = Energy - Distraction and Success = Focus x Time The way you gain stamina is by doing things to increase your energy and decrease distraction. I wrote and talked about this here, fwiw. https://vonnik.substack.com/p/state-changes-work-and-presenc... https://www.linkedin.com/posts/stokedlive_focus-is-power-lea...
Comment linking /p/state-changes-work-and-presence
on “Stamina Is a Quiet Advantage”B.J. Fogg makes this point in his book Tiny Habits. And his point *is* that you can form a habit in much less than 21 days, let alone 66. This whole question revolves around the effort/reward ratio of a behavior. When people talk about ~21 days, they're talking about doing a hard thing until it's second nature and seems easy. But there are other ways to make something seem easy, and there is another component in the…
Comment linking /p/state-changes-work-and-presence
on “How long does it take to create a new habit? (2015)”He’s really talking about how to maintain focus and neurological energy, but doesn’t have the right words. Fwiw, I wrote about it here: https://vonnik.substack.com/p/the-inner-game-of-knowledge-wo... It’s something I struggle with, too.
Comment linking /p/the-inner-game-of-knowledge-work
on “Poisoning the Day”more broadly, laptops and desktops have also degenerated as tools for thought, largely because they have been turned into vehicles of consumption. every screen has become the infinite push algorithm. https://vonnik.substack.com/p/how-to-take-your-brain-back i think it's underrated, too, how much the pairing of phone-camera to produce media amplifies the possibility of consumption via the same device.
Comment linking /p/how-to-take-your-brain-back
on “Laptops create systems. Phones feed algorithms. The asymmetry determines power”Some but not all of what the author says is true. PMF is a continuum, but also a threshold phenomenon below which it is better called wishful thinking. PMF is dynamic and can be lost, but that is more a question of the M in which it occurs, and the competitive forces there. PMF and defensibility are two quite different things. PMF is the sine qua non of startups. You should obsess over getting there. Once you have i…
Comment linking /p/how-to-be-lost
on “The Myth of the Product-Market Fit (2013)”Just like nobody can get sober for you, everybody must stumble upon problem discovery and the mom test for themselves. It’s hard to be lost. But less hard than wasting years of your life on a bad idea. https://vonnik.substack.com/p/a-building-complex
Comment linking /p/a-building-complex
on “Addiction to ideas (2017)”The thing is we can't wholly give up our devices and apps, because so many peoples' professional and social lives depend on them. So we have to manage it. It's more like a food addiction than alcohol, since alcohol, you can live without. I wrote about this here. https://vonnik.substack.com/p/how-to-take-your-brain-back
Comment linking /p/how-to-take-your-brain-back
on “Should We Decouple Technology from Everyday Life?”more along these lines: https://vonnik.substack.com/p/how-to-take-your-brain-back ultimately, maintaining focus is tied to overall physical energy (because suppressing distractions consumes neurological energy), and that physical energy is dependent on both health and ultradian cycles. best to alternate between focus bouts and recovery periods.
Comment linking /p/how-to-take-your-brain-back
on “Control your attention on the web – Block sites on certain days and times”