This is a long comment constructed entirely of disclosure and discussion of personal data. Read at your own risk.
In the fall of 2009, I started using the program hamster to track first all the time I spent wearing pants, and beginning in 2011, all my time, 24⁄7. I initially did this because I felt I spent too much time on Reddit, on my feed reader, and on email lists, and in general, wasting time. I thought that by tracking my time, I could quantify how much time I wasted, and reduce it over time. This didn’t work out, but I still enjoy having the data and can occasionally do cool things with it.
Reddit dwarfed the other activities in my waste category, and even my time usage at large (the single-most activity in 2010 is reddit, at 281.5 hours—spending time with my romantic partner was second at 273.4 hours). My reddit usage peaked in August of 2010, when I spent 39.75 hours on reddit.
At this point, I quick reddit cold-turkey (I spent five minutes on reddit in december of 2010). I assumed that since I now had the single-largest waste time activity eliminated, I would be hugely more productive. This didn’t turn out to be the case. As I stopped using Reddit, I started playing video games with friends I lived with. I’ve spent much more time playing video games than I ever spent on Reddit—from 2010 to now, I spent 287 hours on Reddit, and 724 hours playing video games. I rationalize this by saying that most of this (534.4 hours) is “social”—that is, I’m playing video games sitting next to someone in meatspace. But ultimately, I’m still wasting time.
The lesson I’ve learned from this is that it’s futile to try to optimize away all waste time. Humans are not resilient enough to be productive 16 hours a day with current productivity systems. If I could find a way to accomplish meaningful work while playing Halo: Reach or browsing Reddit, I possibly do lots of good things. But I still wouldn’t move through my todo list any faster.
Together, video games and my main romantic partner account for 1,571 hours of my time from 2010 to now out of a total of 9,888 hours total (time spent sleeping is only tracked starting 01/01/2011 and accounts for 2,075 hours). While it’s easy for me to think of these things as non-productive, they’re probably essential to my life as it is now. My romantic partner is incredibly important to me, and video games are the primary way of bonding with the people I live with (especially since I don’t drink). Without those things, I think my life would be worse off.
This data is probably incomplete—a better metric would be the rate that I go through items on my todo list. Since I haven’t found any task software that’s as good at what it does as Hamster is (I use Getting Things GNOME! now, the daily builds are tolerable), I can’t examine that data. But if you’re actually concerned about misusing your scarce resources, track how you use them and decide based on actual data, not based on how high-status sex, drugs, and World of Warcraft are on websites.
It’s not a euphemism, it’s the rule of thumb I used to determine if I expected myself to be productive during that time, and therefore, if I should track that time. Eventually I decided I just wanted all the data and started tracking everything. The main difference is that I started tracking how much time I was asleep. Even before then, I tracked some things while I wasn’t wearing pants (like showering or being on my laptop in bed), and I didn’t track some things I did while I was wearing pants.
People typically think that “wearing pants” is a euphemism; I should change how I communicate that, but it’s still how I think about it.
This is a long comment constructed entirely of disclosure and discussion of personal data. Read at your own risk.
In the fall of 2009, I started using the program hamster to track first all the time I spent wearing pants, and beginning in 2011, all my time, 24⁄7. I initially did this because I felt I spent too much time on Reddit, on my feed reader, and on email lists, and in general, wasting time. I thought that by tracking my time, I could quantify how much time I wasted, and reduce it over time. This didn’t work out, but I still enjoy having the data and can occasionally do cool things with it.
Reddit dwarfed the other activities in my waste category, and even my time usage at large (the single-most activity in 2010 is reddit, at 281.5 hours—spending time with my romantic partner was second at 273.4 hours). My reddit usage peaked in August of 2010, when I spent 39.75 hours on reddit.
At this point, I quick reddit cold-turkey (I spent five minutes on reddit in december of 2010). I assumed that since I now had the single-largest waste time activity eliminated, I would be hugely more productive. This didn’t turn out to be the case. As I stopped using Reddit, I started playing video games with friends I lived with. I’ve spent much more time playing video games than I ever spent on Reddit—from 2010 to now, I spent 287 hours on Reddit, and 724 hours playing video games. I rationalize this by saying that most of this (534.4 hours) is “social”—that is, I’m playing video games sitting next to someone in meatspace. But ultimately, I’m still wasting time.
The lesson I’ve learned from this is that it’s futile to try to optimize away all waste time. Humans are not resilient enough to be productive 16 hours a day with current productivity systems. If I could find a way to accomplish meaningful work while playing Halo: Reach or browsing Reddit, I possibly do lots of good things. But I still wouldn’t move through my todo list any faster.
Together, video games and my main romantic partner account for 1,571 hours of my time from 2010 to now out of a total of 9,888 hours total (time spent sleeping is only tracked starting 01/01/2011 and accounts for 2,075 hours). While it’s easy for me to think of these things as non-productive, they’re probably essential to my life as it is now. My romantic partner is incredibly important to me, and video games are the primary way of bonding with the people I live with (especially since I don’t drink). Without those things, I think my life would be worse off.
This data is probably incomplete—a better metric would be the rate that I go through items on my todo list. Since I haven’t found any task software that’s as good at what it does as Hamster is (I use Getting Things GNOME! now, the daily builds are tolerable), I can’t examine that data. But if you’re actually concerned about misusing your scarce resources, track how you use them and decide based on actual data, not based on how high-status sex, drugs, and World of Warcraft are on websites.
I apologize for zeroing in on a triviality, but Is “wearing pants” a euphemism for something? Or do you normally sit at the computer without them?
It’s not a euphemism, it’s the rule of thumb I used to determine if I expected myself to be productive during that time, and therefore, if I should track that time. Eventually I decided I just wanted all the data and started tracking everything. The main difference is that I started tracking how much time I was asleep. Even before then, I tracked some things while I wasn’t wearing pants (like showering or being on my laptop in bed), and I didn’t track some things I did while I was wearing pants.
People typically think that “wearing pants” is a euphemism; I should change how I communicate that, but it’s still how I think about it.