How to lose time and money
paulgraham.com
paulgraham.com
-Seneca the Younger, from Letters from a Stoic (highly recommended)
I think slaving away doing something you hate is far more harmful than "wasting" time having fun. I get more out of playing hacky sack and/or listening to podcasts than any homework or school work.
So, in relation to this article, I think we should maybe consider "losing time" as doing anything that you deeply don't want to do but are doing just to get more money.
The relationship between time and money is a fascinating one. Great article PG.
Maybe you're studying the wrong thing?
Do you? How do you know? Certainly it feels more fun, maybe you feel less stressed afterwards, but does this bias your decision making? Certainly in the long term you could be wrong.
If I'm going to slave away for 8+ hours/day on something, I would rather have it make me rich than someone else.
Did I get better at anything useful? Not really. But that's okay. There's more to life than an endless treadmill of getting better at things.
We laughed for a while at that one while we browsed videos of people getting hurt on ebaum's world.
I've never had a battle.net account - instead I've always played co-operative LAN with friends. The madness and the glory, the "oh shit" moments where you start cursing under your breath and everybody else piles over to where you are to help, and the tactical analysis over pizza - that's what Diablo II's about for me.
I think the advent of MMORPGs with voice communication has made them much more social - a friend of mine who's a serious WoW player spends as much time talking about his guildmates as he does about the gameplay.
I was a single child and had zero friends within a 3-mile radius. Video games were a close friend back then.
Unlike you I didn't kick the addiction & i've now seen every season.
Damn you and your insidious cliff-hangers Jack Bauer! :P
But excessive cliffhangers are mostly what turned me of Lost.
[0] Do: Scream, build up tension, to be continued, until Infinity. Replace scream with drama (twists).
Same thing with Warehouse 13.
But that wasn't boredom-related. Perhaps you just don't match with this series and should have stopped earlier.
Playing MMORPGs all day seems rather like the first, not the second.
The grinding kil-15-wolfs type of missions often had me going: "ok, only 3 left.. phew"
World of Warcraft can feel like work but you're not really trying to pass it off as work. If you managed to do that, who ever you work for certainly has some issues!
If I'm going to watch a character level up I'd much rather hit the gym. The increasing weights you can lift offer a nice chance for some nerdy analysis while you're also actually doing something useful.
You can create a private beta account using this link: http://ftcy.co/jMSLsG
I could never stay motivated at the gym on my own, whereas CrossFit is nice because it's run as a group class, and you typically have a coach that runs you through the exercises. It's a bit more expensive, but it's the only gym that I've ever actually stayed committed to.
As for results, I haven't lost any weight; but I've lost fat and gained a ton of muscle (it was extremely noticeable in my face.) I've also taken 2.5 inches off of my waist.
But to give you a sense, it took me 3 years to go from 50kg to 64kg body weight (first ~8kg was in 6 months or so). 64 is my IBM limit so it's incredibly difficult to go up from that.
I could squat-lift 130kg, benchpress about 80kg, biceps curl around 25kg and so on ... it was epic.
I've since taken up boxing and in a way it's even awesomer.
I'm not being facetious, I just think that seems contradictory. If I had a lot of money and that same knowledge, I would invest very conservatively.
He warns that careless trading may lose money without setting off fear, he invests in companies he also guides them to try and help them succeed. He doesn't invest alone, the risk and decisions have other people he trusts watching or contributing. They turn down most of the applicants
For later batches, it had become evident that YC's model was promising, and YC also raised money from outside LP's.
I suspect pg means that he spent the day checking / responding to e-mails, reading HN, maybe paying some bills, noodling around the Internet, checking e-mail again, and then discovering that it's getting close to bed time, rather than working on long-term projects where the work he's doing hasn't immediately borne fruit.
The Internet is particularly insidious in this respect, because reading HN, looking at the NYT, and so forth can feel work-like without actually accomplishing anything substantial.
It's true, but it also builds vague background knowledge in a hard-to-quantify way (and I'm honestly not sure how it stacks up to the time invested). I very frequently find myself drawing on knowledge that I ran across during internet time-wasting, whether it was a relevant article I found on HN, or a Wikipedia article I found in one of those random-walk-through-link sessions (or the journal articles I found via the Wikipedia articles...). On the other hand, I also spend a lot of time "keeping up with the internet", so it's not free. But it's certainly shown up in papers I've published in my day job.
It's an interesting tradeoff; I'd say I'm less concentrated and diligent than most of my colleagues on what I'm "supposed to be doing", but I'm also more broadly aware of what's going on outside of our little academic bubble. They get more done on their main projects, but I'm the person to come to if you want to be pointed to relevant articles/libraries/demos/posts on $topic_foo. It's not even so much that it saves me time researching later, as that I'm not sure I'd even be able to make some of the cross-connections between subjects without this undirected information-gathering.
The key is figuring out how it fits into our overall strategy or goals. Is that activity or task contributing to that long-term gain? More importantly, am I actively managing it as opposed to going on blind auto-pilot (e.g. for that investment or project)?
There's no substitute for hard work, just as there's no substitute for self-awareness.
Of course if you set bad long term goals for yourself you maybe always be "wasting time."
I find that if I say no to either then I'm probably doing fake work (or doing real work poorly).
I happen to prefer more specific descriptions of what may go wrong.
His focus is not criticizing having fun, but wasting time without realizing it.
It's not that you're not getting anything done. You're just getting different things done. Compare that to a day in front of the TV. Can you say you've gotten anything out of it? Did you learn anything? Were you able to relieve stress or relax? Perhaps in small quantities TV can provide those benefits, but would trading your entire day be worth it?
Now to take your card playing to an extreme, would it be beneficial for someone like the president to spend an entire day playing cards with non-political friends? Sure the president needs a vacation every once in a while, but assume that this is not a vacation day. There are many more important things that should be done, and even with the relaxation and socialization benefits that card playing with friends has, I believe the president's "wasting time" alarm would go off. There are elections to win and speeches to give. But what about spending an entire day reviewing a minor bill? Sure, bills are important. After all, the president should know about what new laws are being considered. Even so, an entire day could go by without the president thinking "this is a waste of time". After all, he's not playing. He's working.
I think your point of view, and pg's, is very utilitarian. Utilitarianism has its uses in many human activities, including writing code, but should not be invoked when talking about playing cards with friends. When I play card, I do NOT "invest" in relationships, I have no intent to fulfill anything. I am just having a great time with friends. Playing cards, or fishing, or chatting idly, is just a way to spend time doing nothing. And doing nothing, ie spending time without any "investment intent", is the way to enjoy fully your time.
Take another case: if you spend time reading a lengthy novel, say Proust, what is it for? Do you read it because you want to tell your friends you read it? Do you read it because you think it is an "investment", adding up to your knowledge of world literature? Do you read it because you want to learn how to write a novel? Learn about Proust? Understand why so many people admire this book? NONE of these reason is valid. All of them are "intents", "investments". All of them will actually destroy in the egg the only valid outcome of reading this novel, which is pure reading pleasure. (You'll have to pass some barriers to feel this pleasure, in the beginning)
The same holds for painting, music, etc. If you go to a Concert hall listening to Mozart or go to the Louvre and take this activity as an investment in your knowledge of art and your ability to talk cleverly about it, you better stay home watch TV.
The flip-side of this is that by actually reading lengthy novel, playing cards idly with friends, etc., and doing so without intent, you will in fact learn a lot about life, about humans, and also how to handle relationships. But the "without intent" part is essential.
To take your example about the president: I would LOVE the presidents of big or small countries to spend a lot of time doing nothing, chatting with "non-politician" friends, read lengthy novels. They would probably do less mistakes.
We live in a world where we are made believe that every second counts, like in TV series. It is not true. The only reason to live on earth is to be happy, happiness is a state of mind that need some idle time to spawn, let's stop running behind our ghost's shade.
[Edit: typo, clarity]
My impression is that you are reducing utilitarianism to a Mr Spock kind of pseudo-logical thinking. You seem to be forgetting that the ultimate goal of utilitarianism is happiness. It's not about gaining knowledge or even self-improvement. Playing cards for pure fun is not at odds with utilitarianism.
(Disclaimer: I am not a philosopher nor do I have more than a basic knowledge of utilitarianism)
Well, not sure I follow you on this terrain... Let's find something that we would agree is useless, and enjoyable. Maybe fishing alone and putting fish back in the river?
Or you would say that this is also useful. But then anything is useful and the word itself has no meaning (and become useless, hehe).
I may be too much influenced by Eastern streams of thoughts, where we have zen, taoism, etc., all saying that nothingness, emptiness, uselessness are things we should value more, because they are the ground on which everything grows. (Simple example: without silence on which a composer is building, no music is possible)
So, to go back to pg's essay, which is more of a short blog post, I found it was lacking an open door toward these possibilities that "lost time" is not always lost.
The short essay isn't really about declaring activities to either be productive or wasted. It's about learning to identify "empty" activities that waste time with the false promise of being productive. Whether your time is wasted or productive is a personal matter for you to weigh against your own goals and values.
P.S. My apologies to anyone who might take offence to my poor understanding of Zen.
I will argue that whatching TV can be good, provided that you really enjoy it. There is nothing inherently better about reading a book over watching a show if you enjoy yourself.
The key is to actively choose something that you like to do and then do it. Don't watch TV mindlessly. But don't hang out with mindless friends either.
...and get rid of some other ones.