Comment by Aurornis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Aurornis | Hacker News Reader

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> You don't have the time or energy to go to the library for books on a work day, especially with a commute. Same with any other activity.

I hear this repeated a lot on the Internet, but in real life I do things during the week and meet up with a lot of other adults with jobs and commutes for them.

This came up a lot when I was mentoring younger engineers. Every time we did a deep dive into their daily routine, they had a lot of unaccounted for time. They’d list their work day and commute, obviously, then add things like getting ready in the morning and eating dinner at night. Then one of two things happened: Either they’d start to exaggerate their daily routine chores (getting ready in the morning, making dinner at night) until they took 6 hours every day, or they’d be confused about how they couldn’t get the numbers to add up.

Upon further gentle pushing, they almost always realize that they’re spending hours and hours watching TV and on their phones every time. Some times they’d pull out a phone with screen time tracking, be stunned by the number of hours, and tell me it must be broken.

There are some job and commute combinations that won’t leave time for anything during the week, but most people don’t have those. They just have poor time management and their revealed priorities differ from their stated priorities. People will tell you that reading books and going to the gym is a priority for them, but then they’ll spend 3 hours watching Netflix every night and scroll social media for 90 minutes every morning.

8 hour work days could probably be 6 or less with the same pay for plenty of jobs (or 5 day weeks could be 4 days). Some of these jobs could be remote. If your job is draining, it's not taking the same energy as a job you like and fulfills you; it's probably taking multiples more energy and willpower away from you.

Let's not even throw childcare into consideration here. Childcare blows your energy and time out of the water all by itself, yet we still ask 8 hours a day from parents.

People miscount calories like you're saying with time, so I'd say that's accurate, but no one is really forcing you to eat the overportioned, oversalted and oversugar'd foods from restaurants these days (USA perspective). Work is definitely forcing you to spend the time you do otherwise you quickly go homeless.

I think the amount of different activities you can do in a day is a personality thing.

I work 9-10 hours a day. Could I physically squeeze in an Another hour and half of chores or socializing than I do now? Sure. Is that going to make my life better and more fulfilling? No.

But for many people I know, the answer would be yes. They want to do PTA or whatever.

Why do you work so much?

Not the OP, but have been in an identical situation for a while.

Unfortunately the answer I've come to is "I don't know how to stop, and I have nothing else valuable to replace it with."

I have made great strides in the last 12 months on the second part, but the first part is still hard to move past.

For reasons (work is paying for it, sets me up for several positions I'm interested in) I'm knocking out a masters degree. I've had this same discussion with other students who are, like me, juggling a full-time job, house, and family with school. They don't understand how I fit in everything and take more classes than them every semester (still part time, 2 this semester and TA'ing a 3rd).

The time is there, if you're willing to use it. You have 16-18 hours every week day (depending on how much you sleep).

I wake at 6am, work out until 6:30 or 7 (depending on the day) then cleanup and head to work, where I arrive around 8am. I leave around 4:30pm and get home no later than 5:30pm (if there's an accident on the route home). So this is the largest portion of my day and eats up 11.5 hours on a bad day, but 11 normally.

That leaves me with 4.5-6.5 more hours in the evening for everything else. That's actually a lot of time if you're not wasting it. 2-3 hours with my family every night and 1-2 hours doing school work or TA'ing. And since I go to bed at midnight, that leaves me with 1.5-3.5 hours to do whatever else (more time with the family or wife most likely, or housework).

And weekends there's a glut of time. In 18 hours of waking time, I can do a 2 hour ride, 2 hours of yard and house work, and say 4 hours (max) of school work. I still have 10 hours for family, friends, or myself.

> when I was mentoring younger engineers

In what context? At work? If a more established coworker was "mentoring" me about how much work I was getting done and wanting detailed info about how I spend my time outside of work, I'd lie and act confused about it too.

Or as if people use to work 12 hours in a coal mine and have all this energy for dancing and piano practice after.

Modern people are just spoiled and largely delusional.

I had a bad work day yesterday but compared to anything else I would have been doing 50 years ago it was absolutely nothing in terms of stress or energy.

A 12 hour work day is probably not at all the historical norm, and only existed broadly after the industrial revolution.

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