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The Busy Person’s Lies

nytimes.com

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Re: The Busy Person’s Lies

#11

Post by thefalcon »

ryandrake wrote: post #6
dijit wrote: post #2

The article seems to assume that context switching takes no time. If that were true I have a lot of free time.. it's just never contiguous.

Funny thing I noticed: when you start a family and have kids, you are forced to get better and better at the _skill_ of context switching quickly. You learn how to be productive with twelve 15-minute slots divided by interruptions instead of a contiguous 3 hours. Being able to do this is a skill like any other. I no longer buy the whole "in/out of the zone" thing as if it is some fundamental law of nature.

I just constantly find myself out of the zone with a family/kids around.

Re: The Busy Person’s Lies

#12

Post by tboyd47 »

The story seems to be that most people are under the delusion of being busier than they actually are, and if they just paid closer attention they would realize this.

To me the far more interesting question is, why do we feel so busy? I've made the observation to my family on numerous occasions that the most stressful and exhausting work days for me are the least productive, those days when I'm just sitting at the computer staring at the screen for 8 hours. After a day like that, at 5 o'clock I'm literally brain dead; nothing left. When I have some productive goal I'm working towards, my work has the opposite effect; I close my computer feeling energized & ready for whatever's next.

Re: The Busy Person’s Lies

#13

Post by cortesoft »

rudolf0 wrote: post #4

Part of it is that constantly being busy can create a lot of physical and mental fatigue and stress, making it difficult to do things you might otherwise even if there is some free time. "I never have time" can technically be a lie, "I can't do all this and stay sane" usually isn't. I've found even the thought of worrying about work I need to do in the near future can prevent me from participating in hobbies, despite…

As a fairly new parent, I have had a similar realization. I have some free time, but because of the lack of sleep and exhausting nature of the work I am doing, I can't do the productive things I want to do in my free time. I am simply too tired to give the mental or physical energy required.

Re: The Busy Person’s Lies

#14

Post by eppp »

ryandrake wrote: post #6
dijit wrote: post #2

The article seems to assume that context switching takes no time. If that were true I have a lot of free time.. it's just never contiguous.

Funny thing I noticed: when you start a family and have kids, you are forced to get better and better at the _skill_ of context switching quickly. You learn how to be productive with twelve 15-minute slots divided by interruptions instead of a contiguous 3 hours. Being able to do this is a skill like any other. I no longer buy the whole "in/out of the zone" thing as if it is some fundamental law of nature.

I have been practicing it for years now. Sure you can switch and get things done but everything seems to suffer by doing so. Either the time with the kids is distracted or the task is done while annoyed. There are seemingly very few practical things that don't require some setup and teardown that you can't just do in brief snippets.

Re: The Busy Person’s Lies

#15

Post by [deleted] »

JPKab wrote: post #9

The author is clearly well into the upper-middle class financially, talking about nannies and "solo beach days" on both coasts. Wow, how out of touch is the typical New York Times writer these days. Poor and working class people have truly busy lives compared to professionals. We should all remember that.

[deleted]

Re: The Busy Person’s Lies

#16

Post by misterman101 »

twoquestions wrote: post #10

There's quite a few money-budgeting apps out there (Mint, YNAB, etc...) to help you figure out where your money is going, but I haven't seen much for time-budgeting apps. I know I wasn't great with money until I counted every cent for a while, I wonder if the same effect could be replicated for people who don't spend their time as effectively as they'd like.

I started using toggl for personal time tracking this week, and so far it's working really well. For just a local android app, I used aTimeTracker before and it was unobtrusive enough to get in a habit of using it.

Re: The Busy Person’s Lies

#17

Post by greenshackle2 »

tboyd47 wrote: post #12

The story seems to be that most people are under the delusion of being busier than they actually are, and if they just paid closer attention they would realize this. To me the far more interesting question is, why do we feel so busy? I've made the observation to my family on numerous occasions that the most stressful and exhausting work days for me are the least productive, those days when I'm just sitting at the com…

The same is true for me. Not having work at work leaves me more worn out.

Or, possibly worse than having no work, having small amounts of annoying work, but nothing else. The worse is when all I have to do all day is this one annoying bug I havn't been able to figure out. It should take 2 hours to solve but it ends up taking three days.

I'm most energized when I start a new project and I have lots of stuff to build.

Re: The Busy Person’s Lies

#18

Post by apsec112 »

JPKab wrote: post #9

The author is clearly well into the upper-middle class financially, talking about nannies and "solo beach days" on both coasts. Wow, how out of touch is the typical New York Times writer these days. Poor and working class people have truly busy lives compared to professionals. We should all remember that.

I think it depends a lot on the specifics. Of course, there are certainly lots of Americans who are both poorer than the author and work harder. But in the US, the very poorest people tend to be those who don't work at all, or only work part-time. People who live their whole life in a small town with one or two big employers, which move away when the economy crashes; people whose skills go out-of-date, and can't afford a retraining program; people who may be hard workers, but just really suck at interviewing, and always get rejected; people who want to work more, but their employer only gives them a few odd hours a day, and no one else wants to hire them when their schedule is unreliable; people who get job offers in other cities, but can't afford to move. This underclass doesn't work that many hours, and some would call them "lazy", but I think it's usually more like despair. It's terribly depressing to be broke, to not know if you can do anything other people see as valuable, and to have nothing better to do than watch TV or play video games.

Re: The Busy Person’s Lies

#19

Post by Jtsummers »

I did an analysis on my own time once, ignoring the breakdown of my work day and just focusing on overall time available:

  1130-0000 - prepare for bed, relax
  0000-0600 - sleep (roughly)
  0600-0700 - stuff (shower, shave, personal email)
  0700-1630 - work + lunch + commutes
So I had 7 hours each day I was "leaving on the table". Most of it was spent on TV or video games, possibly socializing. I felt exhausted from work so I didn't want to do anything. But realizing I was "wasting"[0] 35 hours a week of my time. Reprioritized, started going to the gym, setting aside the block between work and gym for language study or reading. By the time the gym is done, while I may be tired, I'm in a totally different mental frame from work and can actually get work done on my side projects or more reading or more socializing (that shower after leaves me feeling refreshed, even when I feel like I've been hit by a freight train after BJJ takedown practices).

[0] In the sense that I had things I wanted to do but they never got completed due to poor prioritization.

Re: The Busy Person’s Lies

#20

Post by jostmey »

greenshackle2 wrote: post #17
tboyd47 wrote: post #12

The story seems to be that most people are under the delusion of being busier than they actually are, and if they just paid closer attention they would realize this. To me the far more interesting question is, why do we feel so busy? I've made the observation to my family on numerous occasions that the most stressful and exhausting work days for me are the least productive, those days when I'm just sitting at the com…

The same is true for me. Not having work at work leaves me more worn out. Or, possibly worse than having no work, having small amounts of annoying work, but nothing else. The worse is when all I have to do all day is this one annoying bug I havn't been able to figure out. It should take 2 hours to solve but it ends up taking three days. I'm most energized when I start a new project and I have lots of stuff to build.

too of much of my day is spent on stupid stuff. Time must be guarded carefully--cut out all the crap
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