Do you do more with faster internet?

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This is one of the questions I started asking myself after coming back home...

At university, internet is amazing if you have an ethernet connection. Well, not the most amazing one if you compare to what you can get in first world countries, but it is still pretty fast and sufficient for almost every use case. I even did a 1080p/30fps livestream a few days before I start my journey back home and nothing choked. Updates get downloaded within seconds, videos start playing without buffering, posts load faster than I blink. It's easy to get used to comfort as usual, I almost forgot that loading is a thing. When you can directly load ZIP files without downloading them first, do you even consider slowness?

But at my home...it's quite the complete opposite. Right now I'm typing this as I'm waiting for my software updates to be downloaded. Something that normally takes 20 seconds now needs approximately half an hour plus a little more. It's also quite unstable and connection might be dropped by another connection unexpectedly. If someone else is watching YouTube when you're in a game, you're screwed. Music streaming is also challenging as it is really hard to stream in high quality in conditions like these. To make it slightly worse, mobile data is more unstable than the internet in my home. So, that kinda leaves me with slow and unstable internet for my entire holiday...sort of.

Which, led to this question of mine...do I do more with a faster internet, or with lesser?

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Sometimes it goes so slow that...it never comes out... (Photo from Pixabay)


It might feel a little bit counter-intuitive if I say that I feel that I'm a little bit more productive when internet is slower, but it does feel like that at times. Even I'm a little surprised when I look back at yesterday and today, but it does seem that slow internet helps me to do a little bit more of what I should be doing.

The reason? After some thinking and reflecting I think it has to do with how the slowness restricts me from diverting attentions.

Same as the procrastination logic, the brain is more attracted to do something that seems to be more attractive for the current time, and the strange big blob of flesh and water seems to prefer fresh and newly-popped up ideas...(at least mine works like that...) so that contributes to procrastination and other side effects from doing something totally unrelated when you just have the ease to do so. I can't count the times I went to Google on something about Minecraft when I am studying Physics because it is just something that seems to be more attractive to me and there is nothing stopping me from doing so!

But it's kinda a totally different story at home. Whenever I sit down to write something, it's very hard for the idea of randomly searching something unrelated to pull me away from the text editor. Reason? Because I don't want to wait for the page to load! It is some weird psychology there, but the pain of waiting for something to load is big enough for me to kill the idea of procrastinating my writing.

...and that is why you are reading this now. Thank my slow internet, if anything.

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Beautifully slow? (Photo from Pixabay)


It's quite mindblowing when I kinda realize that it's a better thing that caused a worse situation for me. Maybe I should stop hoping for better internet speed at home, heh. I can use my mobile data when required anyways, it's unstable but it still works if you place it at some right spots at the home. You know, just below the window, tilted at some angle so that we get stable 4G signal until someone bumps that table by accide - ah, here we go again...

Or maybe I should find a way to convince myself to stop lurking around doing stuff I shouldn't be doing, because until now I don't think that someone is sane enough to develop a system to restrict internet speed so I'll still be screwed when I'm back at school. :3

Let's end this post here and see you around :)

--Lilacse


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29 comments
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I like to have 5 or more tabs open and doing things on all of them and writing a story and editing photos so fast internet is a must

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Yeah...normally I have up to 10 tabs opened at the same time and I'll keep adding more until my computer can't handle it anymore, but right now I'll just stick to two tabs at most, lol. If you're a heavy multitasker or needs those tabs running fast internet is indeed a must...

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Sometimes, it is good to take a break from the fast, fast life - even the online speed it seems 😄

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Yeah, you know, humans are indeed weird beings... :)

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That makes perfect sense to me. About a half dozen years ago, we lived in a spot with not so great internet signal, and I'd say 95% of my online time was productive (because I knew I had to get stuff done when I could). Now with my superfast connection, I'm superfast at finding distractions... 😂

Here's to "hoping" you have slow internet when you're back at school! 😉 😜

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That's kinda impossible, because the internet at school only has two states...one is the usable fast and stable state, one is the unusable super unstable state, which in this state I can't do anything at all! LOL So the "correct" solution is still to know how to not procrastinate and distract ourselves...haha..

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I can open 10 tab in one browser doing multiple things at a time, not sure if I was productive or doing more or less....

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That is a kinda good question...sometimes it helps to be more productive if you are really good at task switching, but I think computers are still better in this... :P

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(Edited)

Definitely, if you get distracted by other stuff... Then writing something offline then uploading it later is much more productive (plus, it is easier to resist the urge to publish before a post is ready!). I think for me it is pretty frustrating though... Not for the writing, but for images. It means that I have to compress the images (probably something that I should do anyway... But don't need to in a high speed connection) before uploading... So an extra thing to think about.

In the end I'm more likely to just walk away and do something else (I guess you could that as being more productive!). I'm personally a one tab, one task sort of guy... But I guess that isn't for everyone!

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For me, sometimes the trick is easy...just have something heavy running in the background and the computer will automatically stop me from opening more tabs LOL. You really can't do too much with 4GB RAM, and I think that is one of the "perks" of not having a beefy computer, haha.

Most of the times I'll just upload the images as is...there are tricks if you are using images from Pixabay and Unsplash, in which for Pixabay you can just "copy image" by right clicking on the image to automatically get something with lower but acceptable quality, and for Unsplash you can directly hotlink the image by copying its link (also in the right click menu). But if you're using your own image...yeah, I'll just let them upload...haha. But you don't need to compress them if it isn't troublesome for you to upload, though. Most Steem UIs automatically compress them if it's too big before serving them to others.

(Except for Partiko I guess, not sure if they fixed that.)

I hope that I can be a one-task guy too...lol. Although for most of the times it's hard to do so because of "external factors" (i.e. being asked to do something else when doing something...)... but I'll try my best! :P

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I am objectively more productive with faster internet, otherwise I get stuck in a variation of:

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Ah, xkcd, the memories..

But yeah, that reminded me of how I just lurked around doing nothing when waiting for my system updates to come in...it happens. Lol.

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Ha! We sing the same song with dreadful slow speeds my friend.
Add to that "capped" internet and we cannot even watch videos for fear of running out of airtime.
Slow is as slow goes, but at least it gives us time to think and to drink coffee hahaha.
Blessings!

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Drinking coffee when waiting for your stuff to load...seems like a good idea!

While I normally just put things on download while I go on with something else, like reading another saved article or sweep the floors, so it isn't that troublesome if I get my planning right (yes, so there's some training for my planning...). But if it's capped...ouch...

(Although for some reason I really use little internet bandwidth, I did the calculations once...probably has something to do with my habit of skipping videos, lol)

Thanks for stopping by!

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At least I know that I'm not the only one with a slow connection, it's quite difficult to adapt to the slow connection, after having enjoyed a fast one, but there is that as it says here, try to be productive and while waiting for one thing is solved another!

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Yeah, it's indeed a little bit weird waiting for hours for my albums to be loaded offline... but it doesn't affect the rest of my workflow, lol. I guess adapting to the situation is the key here.

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My first thought was "of course I could do more with faster internet.", but after reading the post I think you may be right! The internet can get to be very distracting and I can easily waste my time online when I have more important things to be getting done.

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I'm from a country with a slower internet and the government is also not very concern about it. It sucks and I really believe that I can do a lot more with faster internet.

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Sounds like me a long time ago! Although now the speed is still not good... (it's just a 2x increase, but since we don't have to pay anything extra so I'll live with it, lol) but I've decided to use other ways to make life less miserable, such as downloading things smartly with an old phone, use content tracking on my browsers, and sometimes taking a little bit further on my phone with Opera Mini (yes, sometimes I would just choose to break sites so that I can get my content super fast :P). There are also some other funny tricky that I use...but maybe that's for another post, lol.

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I think it’s good to have a reason to get off the computer. Today my laptop had a total brain fart in the middle of the meeting. I really needed to take notes and for a minute I couldn’t figure out what to do since I always take notes on my computer. Then I had the amazing revelation that I could get a notebook and a pen.

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It's been quite a long time since I last wrote on paper with pen...

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I have only decent speeds at my house, but very fast speeds at the university where I work. My house is fast enough that it is usually ok, but I often have to choose between screen sharing during meetings or showing my face. Sometimes I get away with both, sometimes it lags. The worst problem at home is not the speed, but just how the connection seems to fluctuate and frequently drop completely.

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Fluctuation is also the main problem of the network in my university. Before they removed the awfully low speed limit, we have pretty stable internet (it just lowers the speed limit even more when many students are using it at once). But now, they removed the limit so that everyone gets to have noticeably faster internet, but you know what happens when DoTA2 has an update...

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I didn't look at it that way until now. Our connection speed is quite reasonable compared to other countries. Our internet plan right now is at around 25 Mbps which is enough to keep me distracted. I guess it is one reason why it takes too long for me to finish a post lol. I look for a good playlist in Spotify while I work, check out some new movies to download, check out some trailers for new movies, ect... That explains it all lol.

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Yeah, looks like we're in the same boat...except that I normally get distracted by YouTube videos instead...

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