How to lose time and money

> [playing cards] you are investing in to those relationships and fulfilling a very basic human desire for socialization.

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]

I really hated the politics and rhetoric of 24, but was somehow compelled beyond my will to watch every single episode. I knew it was unhealthy as I'd stay up way too late and ended up getting weird & anxious (head full of of right-wing fantasy combined with prolonged sleep depravation).

Unlike you I didn't kick the addiction & i've now seen every season.

Damn you and your insidious cliff-hangers Jack Bauer! :P

If I give you 5M$ now, what would you do? Now, do exactly that, without those 5M$.

I always thought that the best way to avoid losing a lot of money is to diversify and avoid leverage. Derivatives is leverage big time, it's speculation, not investing, you can lose much more than you invested. Diversify and avoiding leverage as a VC would be to invest a relatively small amount of money over many potential companies. So can avoiding leverage to conserve your investments work the same way with time? Leverage as a small company might be like sub'ing out your work to others. I've never read anything positive with that approach. How about at the personal level of the article - some wasteful activities can be avoided but stuff like email is not going away. So leverage this down time by multitasking. It would take me 4 hours of planning for 2 hour of programming. While I wade thought these emails I am also going to think about, plan, research, and write down what my 2 hours of programming is going to be. During these non productive downtimes, I can get really boring jobs done, the time passes quicker, and I have a head start when my productive time starts.

I've tried various methods, but a little notebook seemed to always work the best. Of course you can always transfer some data to a spreadsheet if you want a chart or something, but the only thing I really ever check is "the last time I did this exercise for this target reps what weight did I use and how many did I get?" Use that number to determine what to do today. Checking takes about 20 seconds. I now have years of weight training workouts in my little notebooks :)