The psychological importance of wasting time
qz.com
qz.com
Granted, this time doesn't offer much benefit in the course of the working day, personally I'd find if I started work early, that sometimes the meat of my day really wouldn't be productive until later, even though I had been at work for several hours before productivity really took off.
When I had my second son and my wife stayed home for three months, I found myself spending most mornings going to the park with my children and wife and just enjoying the first part of my day with them. Each day I did this I came into work in the afternoon with a lot more energy and focus and finished the same amount of work, or more, plus I was able to enjoy my family and felt more fulfilled overall.
If I had started my day rolling groggily into the shop with coffee in hand and heroically pounding away, it would have taken me those same hours just to wind up into productivity, and my day would feel more tiring and unfulfilling in the end.
Honestly, 7 years in now, I've found I have a natural rhythm to my day, hours I'm focused, hours I'm tired, hours I just don't care and want to do something else, and if I try to work outside of this rhythm, it doesn't make me any more productive, just busy on my own time and needlessly braggadocios towards others when I can say I "worked" 16 hours yesterday when really only 5 hours had anything get done.
This is my own experience though, and to each their own. I tried all the productivity hacking and life hacking and it seemed for me, at the end of the day, that finding time to not work did more to help my work than working for the sake of work.
In my case I am a freelancer, so I have strict deadlines and clients might expect me to work the full 8 hours or more. Hell, I've even been asked to work over the weekends and get my hourly rate adjusted accordingly.
I always decline, my flow state does not last more than 5 hours per day with plenty of lazying around on weekends, and working more than that would mean spreading it to a mediocre productivity.
Deadlines are met, and clients are happy (as far as I know).
Unless we are underachievers, I suspect many are in the same boat and would be as productive with 20% fewer hours.
I feel like I could be just as productive with fewer hours but there is somewhat of a financial conflict when being paid by the hour.
This way, I don't feel like I'm ripping my clients off if I'm working only 2 hours today, or diluting my rate too much if I manage to work 12 hours tomorrow. I really enjoy this freedom.
Which doesn't feel like ripping off by either side even if you take a whole day off if you keep the deadline accordingly.
I think the right way is to write the specs down clearly in the initial contract, but since most projects seem to go way past their expiration date, it would entail spending a non-trivial amount of time of continuously updating and agreeing on the new contracts.
Anyway, I often have a couple active project at a time, but no more than that because it would make scheduling my time a nightmare. And context switching halfway through the day takes a considerable amount of mental energy.
Initially, both sides agree in what to deliver (no concrete spec but we talk until we know what needs built) at what price and that is usually enough to ask for more if other side tells me something new or if I'm getting a decent deal for monthly charges after going production, then I tend not to bother much about little extra additions.
I always ask questions as I encounter them to be sure that I'm not developing against their intention and let them see the progress continously too.
I even question whether what they want is valid or not and provide the reasoning in plain language without much technical terms why I'm complaining about it.
The only problem would be I can be slightly behind schedule often on everyone by managing 4+ clients in parallel.
Task switching seems crazy but I guess I'm trying to free up brain memory as much as I can to speed it up by not caring anything unnecessary in life (Have no TV, don't care about personally uninteresting stuff even if popular around, work from home where it's quiet etc)
Man! this is precisely what I care about not one more story about billion dollar unicorn. Would Love to hear your story sometime.
I work for myself with short term help hired in as needed when orders require, typically seasonal. I build customized conceal carry gun holsters for the CCW market nationally and sell internationally as well.
It's a very small business, but I worked to become a niche expert in my part of the field with my product, and I largely do everything on my own, website and marketing work, product development, research, customer support, follow up and feedback, customized manufacturing software using barcoding and kitting parts, customized shipping software, CAD, etc. My hobby is software and machine tools, it's how I relax and have fun, and it's helped my business keep overhead low and productivity up while being able to tweak things as I notice areas needing improvement.
Admittedly it's not the most efficient way of doing things compared to how I could do it with a huge team of people and lots of outside investment and expert help, but it keeps my operating overhead very minimal(!), my stress level low(!!), time available for family high(!!!), and I learned a long time ago as a small business owner that a dollar not spent is a dollar you get to keep for yourself to do things you enjoy, or choose to invest.
Your hourly rate as a business owner isn't just the total revenue coming in, you have to constantly think of expenses going out at all times. Earning $6,000 to keep $200 can be very stressful for a small business owner with an inconsistent market and the normal fluctuations that happen. Some very large businesses work on this model and scale it into the billions to really make it work, but I can't do that. I want to earn several hundred per day and keep several hundred per day (after fixed costs, taxes, etc.) I need to feed my family, keep the lights on, and save for the rainy day fund, so it's my priority.
It boiled down for me that I had a few specific requirements for myself and my business, which helped to shape my business that others in the market have not done, and as a result I know other companies eat my lunch when it comes to segments of the market, but I'm aware of these things and it was a conscious choice. I could have been as successful as some of these companies, but I personally know and talk to many of my colleagues in this position in the market and they've sacrificed more than I was comfortable with, both with health and family, most are divorced it seems.
Ultimately, the business has to work for your personal goals. If you want the billion exit, you will obviously engineer your life and the business in that direction in regards to investing and procedures, but I didn't want that game, I'm trying to make a living and not let work consume me. It's a really hard balance.
Would you allow high-value employees to put in high-quality 4 hour workdays? Why or why not?
OTOH, I would demand some sort of measurable feedback and/or self evaluation from employees to determine which schedule works best for them.
Maybe that's just too much overhead for a larger team, though. Perhaps at a certain point in size, the productivity gains VS overhead of "managing" more flexible schedules, become minimal.
I know I can work whenever, but most people have been conditioned to put in hours through a lifetime of previous employment and it's extremely difficult to break the habit once it's ingrained.
I know I've tried giving many employees lots of runway, but in my experience, hourly and even piece work (commission) employees can find a way to make a 1 hour task fill the 8 hours instead of efficiently working out of it and moving on if the incentives aren't there to break them of it. Others will abuse it and not get the work done.
It can be frustrating.
It's not that grinding away at the PC makes one any more productive than folk who follow the article's advice. It's just an even bigger weight on one's shoulders. Instead of feeling like you owe society, your coworkers or your employer something, you think about owing people paychecks that don't bounce and owing the bank account balances that aren't negative.
Seeing past that and becoming aware that taking a walk now and again won't change any of that in the big picture, because the big picture depends on the more cosmological success or failure of your business model to grow/scale, is hard when life is that kind of constant struggle. And then you constantly feel like a moral failure—I mean a real piece of shit, not just a slacker getting away with slacking—when you binge-watch something on Netflix or cruise HN or YouTube because you're constantly burned out.
This of course does not lead to more productivity. It leads to a lot of "productivity" where you work late into the night or early into morning, but know a surprising lot about all the latest memes and goings on du jour of the internet.
What I found works for me is exercise. Can't convince yourself that you can sit still and stare at the ceiling for an hour? Going for a run has the same effect and it feels productive.
Added bonus: you don't look idle to others either. Saying "I wanna read for an hour" is often met with "Ok but can you do the dishes and the laundry while you're not doing anything anyway?". Going for a run or hopping to the gym is met with "Ok."
Both from your subconscious and the people around you.
The thing that helped me with my small business, is the age old wisdom, the less I spent, the less I had to earn for the business and the more I could keep for myself. Instead of burning money on things that didn't help the business, or provided very small benefit financially but added more hours to grind out, I killed those things off and buried them.
Changed my life with owning a small business for myself. It went from spending money like it was going out of style to gain a few more on top, working insane hours everyday, literally almost killing myself with neglect to my health and sleep, to enjoyment again and restoring my health.
Frankly, some businesses and ideas won't scale, no matter how hard you try, and they won't exit for millions or billions at an IPO, but it doesn't make them failures if they give you the ability to provide for your home and find time to do other things that might down the road.
Just my two cents. I've been in your shoes as have most here. Starting a business is one of the most insane experiences I think anyone can go through.
Oh, I agree with that. My business aspirations aren't much higher. But sometimes even getting to that point is a challenge. As you say, high personal or business expenses can be a major reason for that.
As for "procrastination" through "work-days", I don't do that much, maybe an hour of "random rubbish" a day tops. Grabbing lunch is a nice short break; eating it, another; 10 minutes of weights, another; showering, (h)eating dinner, filling/emptying dishwasher.. it all adds up to just the right amount & length of brief brain breaks "aerating" the work day/routine.
The feeling that's worse than any sort of misguided guilt about off time is when you did power through some 12-15 hours and reflect back on & summarize what exactly one has managed to produce net --- it often feels like disturbingly little for the time, given all the high-level tooling, frameworks, helper libs and the fast hardware & internet we all enjoy today.
Definitely. Especially when coming by 12-15 hours is incredibly difficult, for any number of reasons. I often come away with the feeling that for having run this kind of marathon—and that's what it feels like nowadays—I should have managed like a week's worth of work, especially considering, as you say, all the perceived efficiency gains.
But modern high-level tooling and frameworks have their drawbacks, too. One spends an inordinate amount of time figuring out how to do things "the frameworky way". I understand the upsides, of course, but it has still led to a profound frustration with the modern-day practice of programming. Back when I wrote C, I may have had to write 10x as much code, but at least I was churning out lines of code perceptibly. With a small standard library, there wasn't that much to stop and look up. It was an exercise full of "creative flow". Nowadays, I have 27 browser tabs and 5 API references open any time I need to actually do anything, and that in itself can be a major psychological blocker.
This "If I do more through the night, then I can impress the client a bit more as a work done today" feeling is pretty shortsighted but it kind of still drags me to late night work especially when I'm behind schedule.
But sometimes when I feel burned out, I take a break thinking I have the right to kill anyone who interrupts my time, even if it lasts for a day.
I found out about rest when I started to track my worked time exactly. I like to track things and wanted to see how much exactly each specific activity takes. I would write down how much I am actually really working and what exactly I am doing e.g. staring at monitor with code while daydreaming does not count as coding. Chatting with colleague does not count etc.
Result was that I could see drop in what I produce after working a lot. Sometimes it is just a question of doing experiment on yourself.
The music relaxes me and doesn't let me focus on any surrounding snippets of conversation, and I just let my mind wander along with my feet as I traverse our campus with no particular destination. (Our "office building" was originally an old mall, so it's huge and spacious.) This is surprisingly refreshing, and I usually find that I arrive at my desk energized mentally by the end of the hour.
Is it that you don't want to hurt the feelings of others that you lie? It's a little immature.
"I like to wander around campus a little during lunch to recharge. Thanks for asking though, maybe dinner?"
Like you, I usually find myself refreshed afterwards, and often wind up walking back to the office excited to tackle something that I'd been dreading when I arrived in the morning.
It is not about the annoyances that at-the-desk-eaters create for their immediate surroundings. Eating creates noise and smell pollution. I don't want to smell your tacos, and I don't want to hear the scratching of a spoon in an empty joghurt cup.
It is also not the thought about hygienic implications. Lots of the food consumed at desks is finger food. I've grown up getting taught to wash hands before eating and to use knife and spoon. The thought that someone changes between food and operating the keyboard, a piece that has been proven to be dirtier than toilet seats, is unsettling.
No, it is the fact that the person sees eating as a mindless task that can be done _while working_ that bothers me most. As if it was filling up gas at the pump. No, eating to me has two dimensions that these cultureless creatures spurn: that food is, next to breathing and sleeping, one of the most important things that keep you alive. You liteeally are what you eat. Your body tells you very directly what it needs and how much. But you got to listen to it while you're eating. It is already a series of sensations that require being mindful. Just think of the texture, smell, and taste of a leaf of basil. Of olive oil. Of fresh fish. Wonderful.
The other side is that eating is a social endeavour. It is an opportunity to bond and build empathy. It's an opportunity to relax and get good ideas as a team. Also to exchange information. I would say those of our team that go out for lunch regularly are more successful than the ones who don't.
So, I think eating at the desk while working is wrong in many dimensions. Taking a walk is definitely a good idea, too.
Well sheesh where did you grow up, Silenceville? Peaceful Springs? ;)
> Your body tells you very directly what it needs and how much.
True in the case of severe deficiencies. Otherwise it'll at best signal "give me all the essential aminos and" (depending on mitochondrial preference / adaptation) "fatty acids / glucose you have, in whatever hopefully digestable format".. =)
> But you got to listen to it while you're eating. It is already a series of sensations that require being mindful. Just think of the texture, smell, and taste of a leaf of basil. Of olive oil.
All these "sensations" are pure acculturation. The only signal I get from "a leaf of basil" (any leaf, really) or any vegetable oil is rejection. We're not born with any taste, just with a sucking reflex, the rest is shaped by our moms and the others around us. You can of course enjoy this situation mindfully and perceptably, more power to you! =)
This sort of thing is rage inducing in some folks - there is a neurological thing that makes folks become angry at certain sounds, to the point of wearing earplugs at dinner. Eating is a common trigger sound, as is yawning and other such sounds.
I suspect it's something my mother induced in me. She had the same problem if anyone else at the table, was eating with their mouth open, or otherwise noisily. It doesn't bother me at the dinner table or when I'm eating. But in any other context, any crunching/chewing/sucking noise just grabs my full attention and disgusts me.
I mean, sure there are people who did not grew up with proper hygiene education and such but, please, this is not everyone. I want my keyboard clean because I work on it. I know when to wash my hands. I'm not 5.
And yes, it's a social thing too. I worked for several companies in Germany in almost all of them the dining room at 12 was a horrible gossip melting point. To me it's social pressure. I'm not even hungry at 12. I also don't want to have my break being filled with the latest office gossip. It's terrible...
So as you see. Sometimes it's just a different perspective and probably it's not the same everywhere.
For some perhaps.
I've always preferred eating alone and undisturbed.
Also, the last thing I want to be doing during my lunch is bouncing ideas off my team. That's work, and I do not get paid to work during my lunch, so I will do anything remotely related to work during my lunch.
It's my time, so I spend it eating alone, catching up on news or reading a book.
Sometimes I sleep. I have a nice, super comfy setup in the car, should I need it.
Often, I play. Or walk. Just get into idle and stay there for long enough to matter.
I dont think it increases my productivity one bit, but I love it and I think it's precisely because I am already good and productive at what I do that I can enjoy these sort of relaxing moments.
The trouble with that in turn is that it's a person's habit or emotional orientation, and likely doesn't change just by being given evidence that you're more productive if you give yourself a break sometimes. Habits don't respond to evidence because they're pattern continuations, not logical choices.
I like the attack on the fundamental ideology at play (not just the frame built on top of it) in the statement that "wasting time is good". I think it might be far more helpful.
I would say that you need to grow as a person at every moment. This includes sleeping, walking in the park without thinking about work, learning themes unrelated to your professional occupation (humanities are great for software engineers), spending time with good people, and of course meditating.
There are almost universal time-wasters though, especially if you spent enough time with them in the past – online and other endless games, most of the movies and TV series, arguing on the Internet, etc.
When you have a subtle feeling that you have experienced it before – it's time to quit.
Everyone needs breaks, so factor these into your plan and commit to them fully, planned breaks can be enjoyed without guilt.
Further, the irony of articles that try to justify "downtime" as an enabler for better productivity is very funny.
A lot of people seem to measure busyness, or even the appearance of busyness as a proxy, but business without achievement is not productivity.
I think the title is quite misleading as I doubt the majority of time wasting as it happens in the modern world has any good psychological implications:
A while back I wrote a post analysing Coldplay, Minecraft and my own previous start up in relation to "doing nothing", someone might find it useful: http://unratedtogm.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/doing-nothing-will...
A recent book I bought written by Cal Newport "Deep Work" inspires me to keep my habits, with some refinements.
I pay a price for taking lots of time off: "leaving money on the table." For me it is worth it.
TV is source of background cultural knowledge and is enjoyable for that reason. When it ceases to be enjoyable one can stop watching.
OK, one might be addicted to watching TV, but that's a separate issue. Here one is using the TV to avoid addressing other problems. True, it might take a period of mindless watching in order to appreciate this. Has that time been wasted? Well, no, because it had to be spent in order to gain that very appreciation.