This is true and a valuable correction, however I would argue that our planning ability was evolved for very different goals in a very different environment, and while it works pretty well at “figuring out if your friend is backstabbing you” or “figuring out how to get calories”, when it comes to long-term goals in the modern environment (“how do I manipulate this laptop so as to make me millions of dollars over the next 5 years?”) it performs miserably, and all Anna’s points then apply.
Paul Graham recently made a related point, the world is getting more and more addictive, and in order to be productive we must develop more effective screening and anti-time-suck methods: http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html
On the plus side, there are a few great people working on this problem—Merlin Mann comes to mind.
This is true and a valuable correction, however I would argue that our planning ability was evolved for very different goals in a very different environment, and while it works pretty well at “figuring out if your friend is backstabbing you” or “figuring out how to get calories”, when it comes to long-term goals in the modern environment (“how do I manipulate this laptop so as to make me millions of dollars over the next 5 years?”) it performs miserably, and all Anna’s points then apply.
Paul Graham recently made a related point, the world is getting more and more addictive, and in order to be productive we must develop more effective screening and anti-time-suck methods: http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html
On the plus side, there are a few great people working on this problem—Merlin Mann comes to mind.