The polling hour
a productivity hack & the epic of PS/2
[day 26/30 - epistemic status: pretty confident all of this is true]
The majority of things your system 1 thinks of as urgent really are not urgent at all.
Why do you follow breaking news on election night? Sit with this one for a minute.
It really doesn’t matter if you refresh the news 300 times per day or only check once in the evening. The same goes for your email and all the other places you go and check for bubbles with flashy colors with the number 1 in them.
It’s very likely an evolutionary thing. When we were hunter-gatherers, urgent news was usually very important to your personal life and more importantly: came with agency. This isn’t true anymore. You can’t change the presidency and it really doesn’t matter if you know now or tomorrow. The same goes for the response to your job application.
Also: gambling, you love refreshing your email because uncertain reward releases excess dopamine. We have built cities on this neurological quirk.
And listen, I get it, in the age of meaninglessness, cold beds and soylent: salvation from crippling loneliness truly can take the form of a discord message.
I want to tell you where I’m going with this but first I need to tell you the story about an argument I had 3 years ago with my then partner about keyboard & mouse latency.
PS/2 vs USB
When you think of a mouse connector you think of USB-A. The one that doesn’t go in one way and then you flip it and then you flip it again and then it goes in, you know the one.
This wasn’t always the case, back when we were still figuring out all the computer stuff we had unique ports for everything. If you remember phone chargers in the late 2000s you will know how much this sucked but allow me to indulge for a second, since at least one of them had an actual benefit.
Behold, the PS/2 port:
If you have an especially old computer your motherboard might still have one! (check on the back ellie!)
This port was made specifically for connecting mice and keyboards. Therefore, it could be designed from the ground up for this purpose.
How PS/2 works is that when given an input, it will cause an interrupt in your CPU, which basically means telling it: “stop everything you’re doing right now, we got an input to process”.
The USB standard functions a little differently: it works via polling. It basically asks your mouse 100 times per second: “hey are you doing anything? you got any inputs for me buddy?“ and then informs the CPU each time. Now the reason USB is like this is mostly for compatibility, since a polling routine like this is a compatible with way more ways to process information than just a mouse (think of a sensor reporting a ton of data, you wouldn’t want 100 interrupts, no no trust me you wouldn’t).
Anyway, all this to say is that PS2 actually could have way lower latency than USB! Why?, let me draw you a diagram.
So anyway, in the worst case (a polling rate of about 100Hz) USB-A could introduce a delay of up to 9.99ms. On a 144hz monitor, this could cost almost 2 frames. Unacceptable!1
If my memory serves me right, my then partner got completely obsessed with this for approximately 3-4 days, scouring the internet for motherboards with PS/2 connectors and for PS/2 mice and then never spoke of it again. (they didn’t even end up getting one!)
The polling hour
Okay, I pulled a sneaky on you, this was mainly an excuse to tell you about PS/2 mice but I promise there’s also an actual productivity hack coming.
If you want to be up to date with your email (or twitter or reddit or news or whatever) you have 2 options.
Interrupts (notifications)
Polling (refreshing occasionally)
Judging by how many of my friends are on do not disturb, I think we’ve all discovered interrupts suck. Much like a CPU, if we get interrupted we will get annoyed and lose a bit of time trying to re-focus ourselves on the task at hand. But the benefit is obvious: you get notified immediately, no delay.
I hate notifications! I have almost all of them off at all times, because of this reason.
But the cost of no interrupts is the polling slot machine. And you really do not want a slot machine on the same thing you’re using to read a very, very boring paper.
The reason I write this article is because I can’t handle the slot machine.
My proposal is simple: Enable notifications for the actually urgent things and for everything else introduce a “polling hour”.
How this works: you do 2 pomodoro sessions (or just an hour of work) uninterrupted, no checking anything. At the end of this hour you go check your email and social media. If you need to respond you do it then. Afterwards, simply rinse and repeat. Close social media again for an hour and go be productive. I have found it especially productive to turn off my internet entirely for this hour.
Most things can wait for an hour. The things that can’t probably will immediately spring to mind and you should have them setup so they notify you on your phone anyway.
If a polling hour doesn’t sound radical enough, go nuts! Have a polling evening! Go ahead! You’re not my ex’s mouse! Have an effective 0.00001157407Hz polling rate and miss out on basically nothing.
Most keyboards and mice poll at 1000hz nowadays