What would you do with 52 hours a week of discretionary time? (2023)

I feel this a lot with music. I technically have a lot of time to do it, but usually I’m pretty mentally wiped out from work and it uses a lot of the same mental muscles as software engineering and managing other software engineers

That's it, I have at least 4 hours / day free time but I don't feel any compulsion to fill it with anything important. This stress some people feel when they have downtime and aren't filling it with Something Productive is a fast track to burnout.

I often hear "The first hour is the rudder of the day."

In my case, it's "The first hour is the time during which my neurotransmitters are still mostly present."

I'd also expand energy to attention, or maybe even "mental space".

I notice that I'm able to think much more clearly when I don't fill my mind with random clutter. (i.e. when I make an effort to stay away from my phone for at least an hour.)

This is the worst of my linked in feeds.

"If there were only more hours in the day we could work."

The problem really is:

  *  Human malware.

  *  Managers introducing complexity where it shouldn't be.

  *  People wasting your time on issues that could really have been emails.

The fact I need a full weekend to recover from people propagating these shitty ideas is bad enough. Don't promulgate this stuff to HN.

try waking up 3-4 hours before work and do something else you want to do but requires more energy. It's hard to keep the habit in today society, but it can be done.

Typically you can do your work good enough with less energy, if you've worked in the same place long enough.

When I stopped working it took me around one year to stop self-sabotage and overcomplicating things. After then I finally started resolving technical and software problems the simplest way, straight to the point, consulting technical literature. It's impossible to achieve this among people motivated mostly by money and hierarchy.

This is in part why I have a job I'm overqualified for at a slow-ish moving corporate. To be fair, I fell into it and the job suits me better than being a software engineer. Being a software engineer isn't bad. But being a data analyst while having the same pay at a marketing department is infinitely easier. I'm the only technical person, so anything I make has more impact, despite the fact that it's easier. Also, one knows how long it takes so I can set my own schedule. Finally, because of this I'm hard to replace. It helps that the IT department is barely functioning, which is why I'm able to fill this gap anyway. It also helps that being multidisciplinary is my biggest source of strength. I'm an okay programmer, I'm an okay psychologist (academically speaking - I've neve worked in the field but published a paper and finished a bachelor in it), and a few other disciplines like that. Here most of that comes together.

I don't work the amount of hours I should, but no one bats too much of an eye since I have already saved them +250K within the first 3 months of working there (not due to my talent, the IT department really isn't functioning there). It was a bit of a lucky homerun to be fair, but I make enough impact for a normal Dutch salary.

So while I am overqualified, it's in part because there are some natural advantages I have in the role of a data analyst as it is a really generalist role. And in the Netherlands, it pays about as well as a many SWE salaries (unless you work for Databricks or Optiver - to name 2 very different but both high paying companies).

Another way to look at it is that we are attention constrained.

And there are a lot of systems out there that are designed specifically to steal that away from you.

Have you stumbled on The Power of Full Engagement by Jim Loehr[1][2]? It crystallises this idea well, divides energy into several different dimensions and tries to give you a framework to figure out which dimension is constraining you and how to expand your reservoir. Some of the practical advice is silly but I still find it very helpful. I go back to it often.

[1] https://hbr.org/2007/10/manage-your-energy-not-your-time [2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/68985.The_Power_of_Full_...

Thank you for this comment. For my job, I am driving in my car anywhere from 4-6 hours a day. You could say I am just sitting there, why don’t I have energy to do anything else with my free time? I’ve recently begun to realize that while driving all that time, my brain is making thousands of subconscious decisions. I don’t have any study to back this up, but I think the brain only has so much capacity for decision making each day.

Many days, I end up zonking out for a 20-30 minute nap in the afternoon. It’s a visceral need to sleep right then. And then I can function at a better capacity for most of the rest of the day.

Time wasted with enjoyment is not time wasted.

This should be the top comment :D

It's theoretical Productivity Porn written by a student (check the about me page) who Wants To Be Remembered For Something.

Admittedly no. This was written back when I was a young teenager innocent to the complexities of the world :)

Recently I have been doing several projects with my car in the shop.

I wouldn't say I was proud of the many many hours spent sitting in the shop and by any metric or observer, doing exactly nothing. On the other hand these hours were essential to success and the work would have gone better and been done quicker if I had spent more hours sitting doing nothing in close proximity to the work. (some time was spent very low productivity cleaning or arranging project related things, most time was spent quite literally sitting and apprantly doing nothing)

That's fair. It's helpful for me to break time into discrete 'blocks' because in my mind, it sets off more alarm bells to say "I wasted 4 blocks" rather than "I wasted 40 minutes". But otherwise, yeah. It's pretty standard "don't waste your time" advice when it comes down to it.

> of course 1/2 of the appeal is just the accent

Deflating is the moment when Arnie's autobiography audio switches from his own voice to a random American-accent narrator. (After chapter 1 or so?)

I guess time-constrained celebrities are, or soon will be, using AI to read their books in full.

Very, very true. I'm now in college and am trying my best to savor the days when I have such little responsibility.

That's a good point. When I wrote the article, I was thinking of the younger phone-addicted generation as my 'audience' and trying to convince them to spend time on doing meaningful things instead of just doom-scrolling on their phone. That's who I was writing for. My apologies if it came across as cliche.

7000000 reels ÷ 50 years ÷ 365.25 (days/year) = ~383.3 reels / day

Each reel being a minute long would equal to 6 hours & 24 minutes of scrolling a day.

It would be close to the most depressing world record to ever exist.

> why school is considered not discretionary time?

Because most schools are so underfunded that, in practice, they are prisons with a food quality to match instead of providers of an environment conductive to good learning outcomes. State obviously varies by country a bit, but it's painfully obvious that schools (and their precursors daycare and kindergarten) primarily serve to enable women to join the workforce.

We're raised to be productive little machines. There comes a point in most people's careers where they ask themselves "is this it?" We're in a crowd of relatively wealthy people who actually gets to act on those questions.

It's also hard to live in the moment and enjoy those times if you're always working towards something else. Recently I have taken to visiting random neighbourhoods with no plans and nothing on my schedule. I was ashamed to discover places I'd passed a hundred times, beautiful streets just one block away from the main arteries.