nice article, but i think its the wrong metric. as others on here have noted, its energy not time that is the true finite resource. i have only about 3-4 good hours of focus per day. who cares about free time when thats the bigger constraint?
The Busy Person’s Lies
151–160 of 199 posts
Re: The Busy Person’s Lies
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
You should start measuring the quality of your sleep using apps like Sleep Cycle. I used to be exactly the same way. Then I realized that the reason I was sleeping for 9-10 hours was because my sleep was "shallow" and kept getting interrupted. It all changed drastically after I optimized my sleeping environment: totally dark, 68 degrees year around, appropriate mattress type for my sleeping position, etc. Now I can g…
Would you recommend Sleep Cycle the most? Do they require the phone physically on your bed or nearby?
After an update about a year ago, it only requires being nearby (nightstand works for me) and uses sound to do the sensing.
Re: The Busy Person’s Lies
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not all work is (or needs to be) "intellectually productive." I see statements like this on HN a lot, particularly from developers (myself included), but most of them cringe at the thought of having 2-4 hours of administrative work every day.
Software Design is intellectually productive. If you aren't, you are not designing and implementing software.
I actually disagree - maybe 60% of good software dev is really really thinking. A lot of it is automatic, based on learning the crafts good habits, repeating motifs, testing can be repetitive but is important to do as you go. Making sample data, talking to people writing emails - so there is a chunk that is not deep foo.
This correlates with my anecdotal observation that the smartest people can write bad code, and it takes them quite a while to absorb the stuff of writing good code.. a couple years at minumum perhaps. Its not just about raw thinking power - perhaps the important bits are, but not all of it.
Re: The Busy Person’s Lies
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
0000-0600 - sleep (roughly) I must admit I am always a bit jealous of people like you who can function on 6 hours sleep every day. After 3 days of that I am wreck.
You should start measuring the quality of your sleep using apps like Sleep Cycle. I used to be exactly the same way. Then I realized that the reason I was sleeping for 9-10 hours was because my sleep was "shallow" and kept getting interrupted. It all changed drastically after I optimized my sleeping environment: totally dark, 68 degrees year around, appropriate mattress type for my sleeping position, etc. Now I can g…
Yes, using ear plugs more consistently would likely help improve quality. Housing quality where I live (NZ) is
abysmal, and you hear all outside noises very clearly. It's half between living in a well built house and living in a tent.
Re: The Busy Person’s Lies
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Sounds like you're a programmer too. I wonder if any other professions have this problem. Believe it or not, I have the opposite perspective. I'd rather spend a whole week debugging something in a gnarly legacy system than architect/build one from scratch. I like being able to say, "it wasn't working before; now it works," and then get on with my life, rather than live with the consequences of a hundred wrong turns.…
If you have a clear bug and you nail it that's a great feeling. But what's annoying for me is when you have a simple task of doing X, but you then realize that you need to replace Y for this, but A replacement doesn't work with B part and so on.. and when it's all done, few days later, all you've done is you just finished that simple 1 hour task.
Re: The Busy Person’s Lies
#156The 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…
One reason I feel busy - there are a great many things in adult life that require attention, but are actually intractable.
For example, all the goods and services we need that are provided by a confusopoly (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confusopoly) of providers - phone plans, health insurance ("open enrollment" season), cable internet access, insurance, investments, real estate.
These are all areas of life that we must engage with, but are also huge time sinks - one can research for hours, days, or years, and not get anywhere further than a feeling of frustration and having been "busy", and we can't solve these things with any finality - next year, it's the same stuff all over again.
Mentally, this is so much worse than actual, proper work, where we can sit down, do it for a few hours, and at the end of it have something that is done, will stay done, and never need redoing.
Re: The Busy Person’s Lies
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sounds like you're a programmer too. I wonder if any other professions have this problem. Believe it or not, I have the opposite perspective. I'd rather spend a whole week debugging something in a gnarly legacy system than architect/build one from scratch. I like being able to say, "it wasn't working before; now it works," and then get on with my life, rather than live with the consequences of a hundred wrong turns.…
If you have a clear bug and you nail it that's a great feeling. But what's annoying for me is when you have a simple task of doing X, but you then realize that you need to replace Y for this, but A replacement doesn't work with B part and so on.. and when it's all done, few days later, all you've done is you just finished that simple 1 hour task.
That's what's killing me currently. Get a task, fairly straight forward, legacy system makes debugging a nightmare, end up spending a day or two on a task the output of which is < 10 LOC.
Re: The Busy Person’s Lies
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
What sort of work would you class as administrative?
Meta-tasks around projects. Communicating/coordinating with other people. In big-corp land, mandatory training and time spent on time tracking (a bit ironic). Dealing with git screw-ups by people new to it.
> Dealing with git screw-ups by people new to it.
I do this all the time. Of course, the person new to it is usually myself.
Re: The Busy Person’s Lies
#159The 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.
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Re: The Busy Person’s Lies
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 affo…
That view that it it's "terribly depressing to be broke" and all the despair the poor in America feel because they can create no value could only be thought up by us smug hacker news software creators. I know first hand that much of the poor are content to live off the government, never had any aspirations and ultimately don't need much to survive and be content enough. They don't know what they don't know and theref…
Imagine you are born into a glass room. Others are already in the room. Initially your focus is within the room. You don't really notice anyone outside the room. But eventually your mind starts to imagine other possibilities. Looking around, ,none of the others are trying to break through the walls, even though they can see others outside those walls. You ask about this, but are told there's no point - the walls are impervious. You start focusing outside those walls. At some point, you decide to have a crack. Yet no matter how you try, the walls are indeed impervious. You stop trying. You accept your lot. Are you happy? No. Would you rather it were different? Yes. Are you doing anything to try and bring about a difference? No. It's futile.
I could also add, that very few on the outside are truly looking into the glass room. Some will be aware of it and its inhabitants, but of those most are uncomfortable or even offended. For some those feelings arise when considering the inhabitants; for others considering the glass room itself. "I did not create the glass room", they think. "I did not put those people there". While they may feel some sadness at this state of affairs, they do not at all see themselves as causally connected to the glass room or its inhabitants.
Some of the inhabitants of the glass room may try and communicate their presence and their dissatisfaction to those outside the room. But largely, those communications are either misunderstood, or ignored. Many of those that tried to communicate conclude that the minds of the "outsiders" are as impervious as the glass walls of the room itself.
To those on the outside, it does indeed seem as the glass-room dwellers have lost any fight. "How can we help those that won't even help themselves?". "Knowing nothing other than the glass room, perhaps that is where they are most suited to stay. They seem content enough."
Perhaps the walls contain an unknown but fatal flaw? The walls seem able to absorb vast quantities of anger without exhibiting any faults. Yet upon reaching a (very high) threshold, that pent up anger may cause the walls to suddenly shatter. I wonder, how much fight will the glass room dwellers will show then?
Edit: grammar fix.