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Comment by frankie_t | Hacker News Reader

It's a very common thing to blame the lack of time and "finding" the extra time by suggesting to give up phone or some other form of procrastination. But in my experience, time is almost never a problem. It's usually:

- energy: learning requires much more than the other "bad" activities like phone

- correct psychological state: procrastination is typically triggered as a response to anxiety for me, so any learning I do instead of the phone will also have this poisonous quality of guilt and fear.

- uninterrupted time

I have a problem that I take any learning way too seriously, such that it would require deliberate focused practice. Sometimes it kills all the fun, and sometimes I give up just because it takes too much energy.

Still, it's extremely rewarding for me to learn stuff, even at this age when intelligence is becoming less useful, or at least harder to monetize.

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For energy, it both requires and pays dividends. It's a bit like working out in that sense.

I think my intended takeaway was that you really don't need to have make the thing you're studying take a lot of time, that daily consistency matters more than pouring hours into practice and obsessing about it.

Though in general, I do still think it's the phones and media diet that is the problem with the sense of lacking time.

Few years ago I had a full time job I felt like I had no time. Then I had a part time job, and I still had no time. Now I'm self employed, with nobody to answer to, and I still often feel like I have no time. Like damn, to get more time than I actually already have I'd need to move in next door to a black hole. Though when I unplug, then holy crap do I suddenly end up with a lot of time.

I think what the parent post was saying is that there is a finite amount of useful mental function time in any one day, and once you’ve exhausted this any attempted learning will be pretty inefficient. Also some jobs will have a faster burn rate. Doing a workout is separate as it doesn’t draw on the mental energy pool.

is true that if you've done some amount of mental effort in the day, learning becomes "pretty inefficient"? I could see that being true if you're exhausted, but then doing a workout would also be a problem.

I would say that learning draws from the pool of "mental energy", but working out draws from the pool of "physical energy". Just because your brain is tired, it doesn't mean that your biceps are.

Yeah exactly. After a hard day when my brain is frazzled, a workout will actually make me feel better.

Probably good to align mental and physical tiredness. Being physically tired makes rest feel very good.

Being mentally worn out just kinda makes you feel like shit. It's a terrible state to be in, you don't want to do anything, but doing nothing also feels bad.

I'm almost certain people are different on this point, but I just want to put this out there in case it applies.

A lot of our entertainments and hobbies, especially in urban areas, are mental to begin with. The most evident example would be scrolling on your phone, which evidently is 100% a mental thing, but there's a lot in this box, videogames, music, reading can all really demand a lot from you mentally.

Explicitly physical things are not so common. Gym. Dancing. Climbing. Running. All of these are things that people who work with their brains often talk about as "relaxing" or "great against stress", even if they can put the body until great physical strain.

It is my experience that when mentally worn out, the "don't want to do anything" really translates to "don't want to do anything mentally", problem being, thinking about doing the physical thing instead is actually a little bit of mental, albeit more emotional, work, but once you ACTUALLY do that, then after spending the whole day focused on deep, complex stuff, being the caveman bench pressing is actually absolute bliss.

Yeah this is largely my experience as well, and few things will raise your quality of life if you do have a mentally taxing life as having one or more hobbies that are physical and ideally requires you to get out of your head (gym kinda does that and if nothing else is a good sort of stress degauss, but dance is arguably even more fantastic as it literally will not work if you're in your head; not that one excludes the other).

From my experience, workout draws exactly from the same pool as mental effort, so after a tough day at work/school, there is little left for a workout and vice versa. Instead of brain spending its energy on thinking, it spends it on muscle/movement coordination.

I find it easier to work out when being mentally exhausted than doing something mentally challenging when physically exhausted. My main sport is climbing and it is perfect for a Friday evening when I am exhausted from my research and teaching job.

Also there are all these feedback loops. Staying active gives motivation to do mentally challenging things, and some of this mental energy can also be invested in learning new ways of staying active!

I find it slightly easier to do mental work after a hard workout, especially when it's cardio, but not by much.

working out in my 40s just makes me tired. used to energize me when i was younger.

I have a feeling you are a young person :)

I'm funnily enough 40. You can definitely overdo exercise, but going from zero to some is generally very good for energy in my experience. It generally lets you turn that sort of tiredness you can't rest yourself out of into the sort of tiredness you can.

If you haven't tried a creatine supplement, I'd suggest trying it. 5g/day makes a huge difference for me in workout recovery.

yea it just gave me tummy ache and poor sleep. i tried to get used to it but no longer how long i tried tummy ache never went away.

Just wait till you're in your late 70s...

Overall, I agree, especially the unplugging part. It's just optimizing for time doesn't really apply in my case. I can carve some time in the evening, but if I spent energy at work, I can hardly learn much.

But, some things like doomscrolling and procrastination are both huge energy sinks as well as timesinks. However, targeting them is very hard (again, for me), as it is usually not the root problem but a symptom of anxiety and uncertainty, which I often cannot deal with. If the root of the problem is boredom, it should be much easier to unplug and occupy the brain with something more wholesome.

Another thing is obsessive optimization, "am I studying/practicing the best way possible?". "Is it worth it with so little progress?". I keep falling to such traps. Writing this, I found that I feel that I lack an example of people doing stuff in a suboptimal, slacky, yolo way, deriving fun and still achieving some results in the end.

Yeah I think reaching for the phone can very easily be a soothing mechanism. Like I've noticed sometimes when something a bit socially uncomfortable has happened, like half the people in the room immediately grab their phones. If you pay attention to when people grab their phones, you start to see it a lot.

Though I think that insight is also probably the first step toward working on the issue. The phone habit masks the problem, but when you take the phone away it can also reveal the truth of how bad it's gotten. Like why are you having these anxiety issues? Is it a lack of sleep, too much caffeine, something to see a therapist about, maybe go on meds? Questions worth asking at least. Self-medicating with doom scrolling isn't going to make things better that's for damn sure.

I understand exactly what you are talking about because I had both realizations myself: thinking that I have no time because of work and chores, and realizing that the phone is addictive because it gives an exit for my anxiety. I'm still trying to solve both problems, though.

So probably the thing you need to start practicing and learning is how to deal with anxiety. Conveniently those sessions can fit right into the time slots you're currently spending procrastinating because of selfsame anxiety. See how long you can sit with it and reassure yourself, before reaching for the phone. Once that's been tamed a bit, I think the ability to enjoy doing something poorly will start to appear naturally as a by-product. Or, you can force the issue a bit by adopting a "punk" ethos: "I suck at this, but fuck you, I'm doing it anyway." And there's your example of doing things in a slacky YOLO way too: listen to early punk rock. They did a pretty good job of channeling their anxiety outward into creativity and energy. And there's a "punk" version of almost anything you can think of. Keep it simple, be a beginner, maybe even mock the experts - some of them need it. Good luck.

Agree. In my experience, the only way to overcome anxiety is to push yourself to do the thing anyway.

The more you safely do something that scares you, the more your brain learns that it's safe.

The key is to break it down into small steps. Each step feels less intimidating and the brain learns bit by bit not to feel anxiety anymore.

It most definitely worked for me.

Yeah, I have a similar experience when I put the phone down for prolonged periods. Though I need to be mindful to not do the same stuff on the computer i.e. open Hacker News or other attention grabbing websites. For that stuff I find it useful to use any feature I can either in the browser or the desktop environment to separate work from leisure.

Idk if this is universal but as soon as I’m on vacation I start learning new things, reading, and getting creative.

When I work, my brain is fried from work. On the weekends I need a long period of idleness to recover before I can read a chapter of a novel.

An hour of study every day is unrealistic for me right now.

Just want to "me too" this. I have two weeks a year where I unplug completely from my daily work and it often results in a new project or skill that I wouldn't have thought of otherwise

I think it's a useful distinction between learning about something and learning to do something. They have very different paths and methods of satisfaction.

When chatgpt dropped I found time to start making stuff with it. All the brainpower that typically went towards checking my favorite creators or reading HN links went into making my first LLM powered game.

2 months later I was finished and the sleep deprivation hit me like a brick.

recently read a post on a moms' forum about her having a hard time getting her kid to practice violin and the skill plateauing.

the breakthrough was a trip to a relative's remote house with no screens / internet. Kid found violin better than other things to do. More Hours led to improvement. That fed on itself and kid spent more time with the violin and improved much faster.

The busier our lifestyle, the more cheap, meaningless pursuits we engage ourselves in, it all chips away at out natural ability to focus on one thing for long term and we're left with a recursive livelock of infinite choices laden with hidden opportunity costs.

how can humans from 1500 with everything stacked against them have better art sense and science insight than humans in 2026 ?

But even then, it's still the phone, in my experience. It takes up so many hours but you also don't really rest, and it also tends to keep you up too long at night.

If you can replace five hours of doom scrolling with an hour of doing nothing in particular, an hour more of sleep, some time staring at a book page or soduku, some more work on chorse, you'll most likely gain an hour or so to use on something that takes mental energy.

> But even then, it's still the phone, in my experience.

It's never been the phone for me, particularly. I just don't pick mine up very often.

To have much more time to learn things I had to learn one key skill: systematically lose interest in syndicated American television. Other people can watch Lost, Game of Thrones, How I Met Your Mother etc.; I will use my time elsewhere.

(OK so I picked three that are widely recognised as having a major letdown as an ending, but you see my point I guess.)

Once I stopped sharing an interest in watching every episode of some show that a friend or the general zeitgeist was obsessed with, that is hundreds of hours (per show!) for a hobby.

And these days it's hobby-enabling money, because in many cases these shows are the only reason to pick up an extra streaming subscription. You can buy a good 3D printer and some filament, or an electric guitar and a little amp or headphone effects unit for less than a year's premium plan for an American streaming service, and a fully playable guitar alone costs about as much as a year's standard Netflix.

I learned this long enough ago that I have gone without a television for decades now. I had to re-learn it in the era of streaming TV. If you think you want to see one of these shows, they will be around forever so you can watch them from a hospital bed one day.

this is true

It isn't always just phone. If you are in a "bad" state, you'll find something else to ease it. And it's often hardly more productive than doomscrolling: just brooding, switching between activities rapidly, or drowsing.

But phone is still the worst offender, of course. It doesn't just steal time and energy, it also reinforces its usage by producing more anxiety

Wondering, which would you consider healthier, an hour scrolling on the phone or an hour watching a tv show (either a fictional one or talk show, either with commercials)?

(aside from this, fascinating math ;))

It's hard to say because it depends on what you're looking at too, of course.

But doomscrolling seems to teach your brain to never pay attention to anything for more than a few seconds, while at the same time being more exhausting than watching TV.

So I'd say the TV is healthier.

Whichever one you are more likely to do with friends and family, I'd say. IME that's TV because we're experiencing the same thing.

If you're alone, it's probably a wash.

I think when people say "not enough time", they just mean "uninterrupted time". This is the thing that is extremely difficult in conjunction with parenting (and not just toddlers). There is a close to zero sum tradeoff between being truly present with your kids, and having intellectually high quality uninterrupted time. But there is actually lots of time scattered about throughout the days! It's just in little moments here and there before you hear "dad, can you help me?". I really struggle with this, I have enough time in these scattered moments for my mind to get bored frequently, but I have nowhere close to the uninterrupted time necessary to develop a real serious hobby like woodworking. (Parenting is also the best thing in the world, this is not a complaint about parenting, it just happens to be that the specific topic of this article is the hardest thing about it, for me.)

That's a really nice point - about uninterrupted time.

I do notice however, in myself as well as in others, that given an amount of uninterrupted time, we quickly get bored and pick up our phones to break it.

I recall that when Covid hit, I suddenly had a lot of interrupted time on my hands. It quite felt like the times from when we were kids, when he had these vast swathes of time in the afternoon and before bedtime.

I think for a lot of adults, besides the chores and errands that keep life busy, it's become a habit for us to fill up what little uninterrupted time we get with distractions.

When I had kids, I made a deliberate choice to focus on hobbies that were more amenable to interruption.

I mostly put aside music and any physical artform that required getting out and putting stuff away each session. Instead, I did a lot more writing, programming, and making stuff on my laptop since pausing and resuming was only a Ctrl-S away.

It also required learning the meta-skill of being able to break a large project into tiny pieces. I got a lot better at leaving notes to myself, not having too many projects going on in parallel, and thinking about problems when I was otherwise idle.

This makes sense but I don't think it works for me. I get irritable when I'm trying to do something like the activities you listed, if I can't focus on what I'm doing without interruption, and then that's bad for everyone, both the interruptee and the interruptor. This seems to be a personality thing (disorder?), my wife seems to be able to switch back and forth from working to parenting without it affecting her ability to perform on either task.

Uninterrupted time? Is there such a thing? Let me explain: Having retired from a tech world that didn't provide me with very many gigs, I have found myself being the roommate of my own mother. I am 69 and 1/2 years old. She is 93 and 1/2. She is in a wheelchair. And she has been widowed twice. I have never been married, and there are no prospects. I do all the cooking. That isn't easy as I am vegetarian, and have trouble cooking for her since she is not. But she can't live alone, and doesn't want to get married a third time.

Basically, I have windows of 5 minutes when I can do almost anything, then she calls me to do something for her that takes 15 minutes, then I have another 5 minutes of work. Instead of coding, my writing efforts have transitioned to writing fiction.

Making a strict hour and a half of no-interruption a day has worked well for me. Learned this from John Cleese (feel free to ignore the word “management” in the title of the video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb5oIIPO62g

Still occasionally get interrupted because of life, of course, but marking off an hour and a half and closing a door and putting all chores/calls on silent during that time is very helpful. And I understand that for many it is simply not possible. Private space is a luxury in much of the world.

A sense of play and no obligation also helps. For more on this I recommend Rubin’s The Creative Act.

Your comment is self-contradictory. Here's what you wrote:

> It's a very common thing to blame the lack of time and "finding" the extra time by suggesting to give up phone or some other form of procrastination. But in my experience, time is almost never a problem. It's usually (...) uninterrupted time (...)

Let's ignore the semantics nitpicking of trying to make believe that "time" does not reflect "energy" or "correct psychological state". Trying to frame "I don't have uninterrupted time" as something distinct from "I don't have time" is a choice that cannot be explained, let alone justified. I mean, do you honestly believe that setting 10minutes aside each day for a task has the same impact as being able to set aside an hour a week to invest in the same task?

Perhaps it's more productive to focus on the actual problem: not having time.

Psychological state is key, and I think you're understating it.

The human mind is always passively working on problems. We are not necessarily aware of how much working memory is "tied up" on background computations, but when it's a lot, we will feel a natural aversion to new learning, it will be exhausting, and we will lack for curiosity. This is fine, working as intended.

When in this state, what one usually needs to do is a different part of the learning process: not absorbing new information or abstractions, but making sense of what one already knows, working out contradictions, assembling larger-scale theories--synthesis, basically. "Learning" is only one part of the arc of "thinking".

Usually this is best done by writing, and usually comes easiest when trying to convince someone else or what we believe. If you can't find the energy to learn, try writing instead.

I'd argue all of those are often issues of how we perceive circumstances vs what actually is going on. There are real situations that crowd out this sort of thing, but they don't apply to everyone (having people that need care comes to mind or crunches at work).

Jung has a great quote to the effect of, "we don't solve our problems, but rather outgrow them." Life is going to feel like mostly-imperfect circumstances for any venture, and your brain can be too good at rationalizing any [lack of] behavior.

I have too much emotional attachment to progress. A lot of people made the mistake of putting too much energy into e.g. career instead of what you really want outside of a paycheck. Well, now I really am doing the thing I've always wanted, of course I suck at it, and most days I feel bad in the process.

Some people feel good about making mistakes. Though necessary for long-term success, this is a completely foreign mindset to me. I have no idea how a person can do such a thing. I tend to overreact instead.

It's not any wonder I would turn to doomscrolling in response, it seems the stakes in my mind are too high and effort invariably leads to depression (speaking from experience). It's too important to me to fail at. Maladaptive phone usage is for escaping that anxiety. I'm most likely burnt out from other attempts in the past. I don't get this feeling at all with work since I'm only doing it for money.

I would feel bad if I couldn't learn the things I really wanted to in life because the emotional toll is too high to pay, after putting in all the work to have a stable income. I still have to manage the rest of my life on top of optional things.

I have been having more 'luck' with those factors and less luck with physical comfortability (I don't mean air conditioning; I have that). Also, timing.

It is very true that it is becoming hard to monetize knowledge. The depth a lot of people seek is often the depth of about at most five or six websearch queries, or maybe three or four AI-enabled queries.

It blows my mind that people want things like neural interfaces and human/computer physical integration, in part because, okay, let's say you have all that information there in your head, 24/7. What would it even be useful for, especially if others had it. You could not really make pay in any career involving a thought economy, and at the same time, you would destroy curiosity and actual learning, and you would almost certainly be (ugh) Bored (and Boring to anyone else). One reason Elon rubs me the wrong way.

Re: energy specifically - I think "psychological state" is the main thing. Once there's a will, there's a way. Make it not draining on your psyche to explore new stuff and you're good to go. This really is as simple as not watching random feeds.

Re: "taking things way too serious" - a general life advice is to be after the journey, not the result. Goes for career, sports achievements and anything along the lines. Worry about getting to some place/rank/etc in particular and it's an endless stream of despair. Worry about just enjoying the practice and not being afraid to rock the boat (i.e. try something outside _your_ beaten path) and you're set.

Actual intelligence is as useful as it gets nowadays, given that it's at a premium.

Anxiety procrastination is basically my default state. I find doing things with my hands while listening to dumb podcasts helps dissipate that energy.

Have you considered it might be something medically treatable? There are drugs for that sort of thing. I've tried some and wouldn't have believed it was possible before - aren't I anxious because I haven't done things I'm supposed to do and the consequences are nebulous and growing? Isn't anxiety a real signal telling me to get them finished? If you lose that feeling, you'll be even more screwed! But it turns out neurotypical people can be productive without being driven by stress.

I am a firm believer in the saying, "Show me a pill with no side-effects, and I will show you a pill that does nothing."

It appears you definitely have received some benefit, but if you do not mind me asking, at what cost?

> But it turns out neurotypical people can be productive without being driven by stress.

As some that is neurodivergent, I cannot even fathom this. I cannot function without stress.

There are side effects and you may have to try different drugs to minimize them and maximize the effect. Medicine makes sense when the side effects are less bad than the problem that the main effect is solving, not only when there are no side effects.

Some people choose what, if any pill to take each day according to what they intend to do that day.

> I have a problem that I take any learning way too seriously, such that it would require deliberate focused practice. Sometimes it kills all the fun, and sometimes I give up just because it takes too much energy

This is a common trait of perfectionists. I have long forgotten the source, but someone once wrote that “Perfectionists have a special ability to turn the voluntary into the obligatory.” I, too, find this in voluntary pursuits.

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