How do you get work done while there is a war in Europe?

It's not easy, doubly so for Ukrainians like me. I've decided to take hours-long breaks from touching my phone or using my browser for anything but work. I like to take impromptu 5 minute breaks while working if I'm stuck or frustrated with something. Have to end that and become more disciplined, otherwise the news and the sadness and the fury just consumes me. Thursday and Friday were write-offs, I'm determined to make today different.

I am not in Europe, but American, and this war does affect me, since we are the largest member of NATO, but also the first target of Russian aggression in this weird neo-Soviet era if Russia decides to deploy nukes (a low, but non-zero, chance).

I give the news 15 minutes of my time every day. Even when events like this happen, 15 minutes.

I, nor you, can meaningfully change the course of events; even if we could, neither of us can tell if we would improve things or make them worse. The only people who can change this now are the Russians starting a civil war in their own country to overthrow their leader to save their brothers and sisters in Ukraine, and I wish them all luck.

I don't glue myself to the news. What's the point? Do you really need minute by minute updates of every operation or event? What actionable difference will it make?

It's an addiction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomscrolling

Something that I’ve recently started doing is pomodoros of 25 minutes with 5 minute breaks. Finding discipline to just do real work is difficult if your work isn’t well specified beforehand. So I use a few tools for this:

* pen/pencil and mini wire bound notebooks. I tried using Apple notes but the phone is a source of endless distraction.

I write down goals for the day, headlined by project name. When I’m done I cross them out.

* befocusedpro app for pomodoros

It has a pretty nice way to setup pomodoro tasks and isn’t trying to be much more than a pomodoro app. My employer uses Jira and my side projects use Trello or Apple notes. It sits on the mac menu bar and beeps when both the pomodoro and break are up. During breaks sometimes I respond to text messages or take a quick walk around but you could read news too.

I write down about 5 “goals” and try to get them all done

* streaks app iOS

This is like GitHub history for habits. After every befocusedpro pomodoro I check the streak for e.g. ( employer pomodoro ) or ( side project pomodoro )

Finally, I put my phone in do not disturb pretty much the whole time I’m trying to accomplish my pomodoros and the only exceptions are my significant other and mom / sister.

That’s it!

Stop amusing yourself with stuff that you don’t actually enjoy.

That’s all following Twitter “news” is. Entertainment.

There are things in the immediate sphere of your life which you can influence. Telescoping in on tragic events which you have no direct control over doesn't empower you or resolve the underlying tragedy. Remember that there are bad situations on every scale throughout the world, everyday.

The best way to empower yourself is to tackle the things which you can change. The more empowered you are, the more agency you have to tackle tragic events. Although it is unlikely that you will be able to personally prevent wars, there are other smaller problems you can engage with.

Why?

Wars go on every day, people suffer every day, it doesn't benefit you or them to obsessively watch.

I'd get it for people who live in or have close connections with the affected area, but knowing every update when you're on the other side of the world? What's the benefit?

Keeping up with the general situation, sure, but up to the minute all day watching... I don't get the point or the motivation besides which is ultimately entertainment, and not good entertainment.

Don't you get bored with news sources? CNN just repeats itself all day.

You're not alone, and there's nothing wrong with that kind of response, so don't give yourself a hard time for it. These are shocking events with global ramifications as well as obviously the awful localised impact within Ukraine.

As an eastern(-ish) European[1] with fuzzy memories of experiencing a small war as a ~4 year old kid, this has been extremely hard to watch. Even though I live in USA now, I don’t remember ever being this affected by a news cycle.

Wednesday evening when the news of totally-not-invasion first broke was tough. Thursday was basically a write off. Friday was luckily so busy I didn’t have time for interneting.

Ultimately what worked was to remind myself all this is outside the sphere of my influence, there’s nothing actionable I can do, and following minute-by-minute news is just giving someone else free reign of my mind. Don’t need people’s hot takes and armchair analysis. A daily balanced report from a proper journalist outfit is enough.

edit: What has also helped was deciding early on that should this go beyond Ukraine into the rest of Europe, I’m flying my family out immediately. There’s only 918 miles by road between Kyiv and where my family lives. Making that decision in advance and with clear pull-the-trigger criteria makes it easier to stop stressing.

[^1] Slovenia

I had some issues with a sort of generalized need to frequently check updates like this in the past. Maybe a noteworthy world event, maybe just national signing day for some NCAA sport or a pro draft, an argument on some phpBB forum. Breaking it was largely a matter of not having access. I was in the Army a while and often not engaged in work where you can shift attention all that easily or safely. Then when I got out, I was doing mostly classified work from a SCIF where I had no Internet access at my primary workstation. Just having that sort of small effort barrier was enough. I lived without a constant info dump update feed scrawling through my eyeballs for many years and realized it made no difference and I did not need that. It's not that I now watch or read no news ever, but infrequently, mostly on weekends. I still kind of care about sports but not nearly as much. Hacker News is the only site I still visit where I can comment and receive feedback, but I make no effort whatsoever to see if anyone has replied to try and reply back.

If you find you can't do it through sheer willpower alone, there are plenty of ways to more or less simulate an airgap. Various browser extensions can block sites during work hours. If you find yourself turning it off all the time, you can make it harder on yourself by keeping a set of firewall rules at your router or DNS rules at a filtering provider that takes more than a click or two to turn off. If you're using company issued workstations from an office and they don't block the sites you find yourself wasting time on and don't allow you to install extensions or configure your own DNS, those won't work. A less drastic possibility is listening to news via radio as a constant background noise type of thing, or possibly even a television feed. At least that way you can still work while receiving updates. It should be less addictive since it's non-interactive and the feed is not algorithmically curated to be maximally addictive to you personally.

It's definitely tricky and I find myself doing the same, refreshing Reddit, BBC News, Twitter and Telegram channels.

It sucks, and I bet the closer (geographically) you are to the conflict, the worse it gets.

Trying to do your routine helps sometimes, but I don't think it's feasible to completely forget about what's happening.

Find somewhere public to work. Its a lot harder to sit unproductively doomscrolling while sitting in a café with other people around. Its not as productive as a regular day at home but its better than nothing. At least for me anyways.

This may help you

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews

How did you keep your focus on working for the last several years, while the war has been raging in Yemen? Hundreds of thousands of people have been killed in Yemen, with a millions displaced and starved to death - many orders of magnitude greater than the death and suffering that has taken place in Ukraine.

Unfortunately it is because "new sources" generate your outrage and decide what you are going to focus on. This is not to say what's happening in Ukraine isn't a tragedy or that we all shouldn't be concerned, but it is to say that there are tragedies and wars raging around the world all the time that are far worse than what is happening in Ukraine today. Many are familiar with Chomsky's "Manufacturing Consent" which details exactly this issue. If you are obsessed with Russia's war on Ukraine and barely give a passing thought to the much more deadly and horrific Saudi/US war on Yemen you ought to consider why exactly that is.

Seeing the Ukranians on my team log in for work (even though they have been told there is no expectation to do so given the situation, but saying they do so for the distraction it offers them) simply emboldens my already considerable respect for them.

If they can work from within an active war zone (Kyiv) I can do so from the comfort of my northern european couch.

It is rational to ignore information about things we cannot affect.

Your energy is much better used in other ways.

I'm struggling with this too. I find that on any given day, once the "seal is opened" on the news, so to speak, it's very hard to close it. As soon as I start reading and doomscrolling, it becomes an incredible compulsion that's hard to break myself away from. But if I can just pull myself away from it for about an hour, the compulsion starts to fade. So I'm trying to restrict my news reading to 15-30 minutes once per day. That fulfills the urge to "be informed", while not endlessly scrolling through millions of uninformed opinions.

FYI, the war in Ukraine has been ongoing since 2014. You care more about the current developments because the media you follow care more about it. Unless you live in the region, there is nothing you can do about it and it is unlikely to have any effect on your day-to-day life, so turn off the news and focus on things you actually have leverage on.

Me? I never cared about that war and I still don't, just like I don't care about any of the currently ongoing wars (Yemen, Syria, whatever). Not following the news makes life generally less unpleasant.

You dont mention if you live in Ukraine, or if you have relatives there. If you don't, why are you glued to the news / Twitter? Why do you need a constant stream of updates?

News of international affairs has never caused me to solve a problem or reduce an anxiety in my own life or the life of thiose around me (quite the opposite), so I do not give it much weight in my mind.

Throughout the pandemic there have been genocidal actions in Ethiopia and China, Duterte in the Philippines has made an incredible number of “extrajudicial killings” and brought total tyranny on the populace, and I’m sure there have been many other atrocities of which I am unaware.

I might question why you are giving so much mental weight to this conflict. I understand nukes are involved via Russia’s involvement, but this isn’t Russia’s only military action in the last number of years. Could it be that you have been primed to take this particular conflict Very Seriously by a news media which regularly downplays conflicts with more casualties and cultural significance?

I limit my news intake to just the Wikipedia's "Current events" portal page [1] which provides just the right amount of worldwide current events.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events

If it’s just twitter then just keep a smallish window up somewhere with whatever the most trending thing is. If there’s a word bubble that kinda thing. Anything really pressing will rise on those fast enough. Otherwise carve out time for “just work” and “breaks to see what’s going on in the world.”

I just haven't been trying too hard on the work side. It's not that important. I knowingly allow my focus to regularly break, I don't care about that. I have friends in Ukraine and I'm glued to the news. I check it constantly.

I have friends and family in Israel. I'm used to working while missiles are flying.

Industrial civilization is already in a state of collapse, plenty of people on HN have done a great job doubling down on the "this is fine", but even prior to the Ukraine invasion, it was hard to put your head down an work for brighter future you know doesn't exist. The immediacy of the war in Ukraine is just harder for most people to ignore.

But just today we got another update from the IPCC [0] confirming what many people paying attention have already known: “Any further delay in concerted global action will miss a brief and rapidly closing window to secure a liveable future.” Key phrase there being liveable future Most people on HN don't believe climate change will be that bad, but for those paying attention we're already on a ticking clock. In 2014 I saw all of this, 2020 onward being progressively worse was something I knew was inevitable.

End of the day you realize that you have to eat, pay rent, etc. so you have to work. Tech workers have had a really great luxury of possibly enjoying or even loving their day job, but that's not why people have to work. We've always lived in a kafkaesque world, tech workers have just been shielded from it.

The only advice is to try to cut out the news and twitter a bit. It's mostly disinformation on there anyway, nobody really knows exactly what's happening and plenty of people have an agenda to push.

Spend so more time consuming "slow" media. Read a novel, some philosophy, or just spend time listening to music. The world will be getting increasingly stressful over the years, it's a good idea to start figuring out how you are going to life in a world of loss.

0. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/feb/28/ipcc-iss...

The richer you are the more you can donate to assist the victims of war. So check the news only a few times a day and work hard to be in a position to help. I should follow my own advice.

I can't.

I'm treating parsing the news as an exercise in recognizing disinformation instead of just watching in horror. There's so many parties between what's actually happening and my news feed that I feel there's guaranteed to be genuine war-time propaganda showing up. I want to build the muscle required to recognize that stuff so that when the same tactics are used by/against my country later in life, I'll be practiced at calling it out.

That Ghost of Kyiv story? Immediately called the clip BS since it's like Propaganda 101. Turns out the video on my timeline was from a video game.

Approaching my news feed as a hostile reader takes enough effort/energy that I genuinely just get tired and put it down to do something else.

Faces along the bar

Cling to their average day:

The lights must never go out,

The music must always play,

All the conventions conspire

To make this fort assume

The furniture of home;

Lest we should see where we are,

Lost in a haunted wood,

Children afraid of the night

Who have never been happy or good.

It's ok to take a few days for your mental health and recuperation. Talk to your manager.

Just like you did get work done when there was war in Afghanistan, Syria, …

Turn off all news and twitter during work hours.

Not being Ukrainian makes it somewhat easier i think, but it's still a very troubling situation.

Hopefully there are some sensible Russians who will prevent Putin from running amok.

My routine consists of checking Hacker News, CNN and local media with the purpose of checking up on any new developments.

One rule i try to live by is no commenting while at work.

And while there is no sympathy at all for Putin, i have no problems with the Russian people, they are still very much welcome.

You stop exposing yourself to news which most likely won’t affect you in any way, and you remember that if everyone stopped doing what they do and just sat there scared of Putin, it’d be his victory anyway.

add this to your hosts file

0.0.0.0 twitter.com

I ignore it. It isn't that hard.