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I logged my activities at 15-minute intervals for the whole year

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Re: I logged my activities at 15-minute intervals for the whole year

#171

Post by TeMPOraL »

whatshisface wrote: post #10
jedberg wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Everytime these come up, I am reminded how little time we have for extracurricular activities as parents This is interesting, because it's only a problem for non-rich people. Rich people solve this with nannies and babysitters and other home staff to take care of chores and child-rearing so they have more time for work or leisure activities. It really puts a point on the whole "everyone has 24 hours in a day, but n…

Isn't paying someone else to raise your children... not raising children? It's like comparing a bank with actual gold in a vault and many expensive physical security measures with someone who owns a futures contract with no delivery.

People weren't meant to raise children in a nuclear family. It's a historical aberration. In the past, you'd offload some of your parenting to grandparents, aunts and neighbors in the village (and the latter would do the same, creating a sort of distributed parenting environment). For urban population in modern times, daycare and babysitters serve as a replacement.

Put another way, taking care of a young child is 16+ hours a day job, 7 days a week job. Even if there are two parents to share this load, at least one of them also has to have a regular dayjob. A small child puts a lot of physical and mental strain on the parents.

Re: I logged my activities at 15-minute intervals for the whole year

#172

Post by smegma2 »

Draiken wrote: post #49

I am always baffled how sad this extreme focus into productivity makes me. If you discovered you were going to die in a year, would you continue to spend all your time being "productive"? I figure almost everyone would shift all their focus on doing things that "really matter". Sadly I believe the world managed to make us feel guilty when we're not doing something that makes someone else rich (majority of jobs). I'm…

My understanding of what you said is that most productive things we do are for someone else's benefit, therefore we shouldn't have an interest in tracking our productivity.

But why not argue the following instead: Most productive things we do are for someone else's benefit, so let's try to fill our time with more things that our productive to ourselves. Would you agree with this take?

Re: I logged my activities at 15-minute intervals for the whole year

#173

Post by TeMPOraL »

skipnup wrote: post #13
whatshisface wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't paying someone else to raise your children... not raising children? It's like comparing a bank with actual gold in a vault and many expensive physical security measures with someone who owns a futures contract with no delivery.

Having a full time nanny would be as you described, in my eyes. But you can have someone clean your flat/house, someone do the gardening, someone doing your taxes. Have someone cook for you. And thus have more time for your kids and still have more free time.

What about a part-time nanny? Few hours a week of paid time off for parents doesn't feel like it would diminish the parents/children bond in any way - but parents get some rest (or a chance to work on their own relationship, or even to catch up with chores), the kid gets someone new to play with, and then slightly less tired parents.

Re: I logged my activities at 15-minute intervals for the whole year

#174

Post by oblio »

renewiltord wrote: post #141
oblio wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your viewpoint still dismisses one of the best categories of "time wasting"/"things that really matter": time spent socializing with friends and family. There have been a few studies that were pointing out people in Southern Italy live very long and happy lives (I think happiness was self-reported), despite living in relative poverty compared to developed countries. Sun + healthy diets + lots and lots of intense soci…

The long life thing heavily correlates with the lack of quality in record keeping.

In Italy? Italy's not a third world country... Do you have any proof for that?

Re: I logged my activities at 15-minute intervals for the whole year

#175

Post by ntsplnkv2 »

MetalGuru wrote: post #148
CarelessExpert wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you had a year to live, you would definitely want to be productive. No, I'd want to be happy. It's the uniquely American Calvinist view that conflates these things.

Guitar makes me happy. Feeling stimulated and feeling like I’m progressing makes me happy. I can be productive in guitar. Where’s the conflation in this?

Progression in guitar makes you happy because guitar makes you happy. It isn't the other way around.

Re: I logged my activities at 15-minute intervals for the whole year

#176

Post by jjice »

I always liked logging my actions to see what's really going on. I think the most common one I do every few months is tracking my diet for a few days to see what bad habits I've picked up and where I need to improve. The first time I did it I realized by protein intake was way too low and that's why I wasn't seeing improvements in working out. It also enlightens me into how sodium filled so much of the food I'm eating is and helps me plan around those.

Same goes with tracking time spent on "human function" as the author described it. While I intentionally try not to be super anal about how much time I spent on certain activities, I think it's almost like a game to make the boring stuff as efficient as possible. As I've added more steps to my daily routines, I've also found ways to keep my time spent reasonable and make certain things asynchronous. Perfect simple example is doing the dishes during idle cooking time. My roommates don't do this and it boggles me.

Also, making those boring moments more exciting is always a plus. Music or a podcast in the shower and kitchen goes a long way, at least for me.

Re: I logged my activities at 15-minute intervals for the whole year

#177

Post by TeMPOraL »

haberman wrote: post #8

For a long time I've wanted to create an Android/iOS app called "Sample Me" or something similar, for collecting exactly this kind of data about yourself. You design a survey with whatever data you want to collect, then the app gives you a notification at whatever interval you configure. A couple taps and you have a sample point about your life, which gets appended to a Google Sheet or similar, and maybe some in-app…

I've hacked something like this using a Pebble and Tasker for Android.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20625346 for the description of source code (it's unfortunately not easy to actually share source code of Tasker scripts, at least not in an easy-to-read form).

The benefits of this approach over writing an app are, to quote: "I made it one afternoon in a grand total of ~30 minutes (including debugging and testing). It requires no Internet connection, doesn't spy on me, I can use it anywhere I am as long as I have my phone in my pocket, I get to own my data in a machine-readable format, which I can trivially send out to my desktop for processing later."

Re: I logged my activities at 15-minute intervals for the whole year

#178

Post by ntsplnkv2 »

onion2k wrote: post #87
Draiken wrote: post #49

I am always baffled how sad this extreme focus into productivity makes me. If you discovered you were going to die in a year, would you continue to spend all your time being "productive"? I figure almost everyone would shift all their focus on doing things that "really matter". Sadly I believe the world managed to make us feel guilty when we're not doing something that makes someone else rich (majority of jobs). I'm…

If you discovered you were going to die in a year, would you continue to spend all your time being "productive"? No. But if I discovered I was going to die in 30 years time, and I wanted to make sure my house was paid for, I'd done the things I want to do, and there were savings in the bank to make sure my partner was safe, then I absolutely would. Most of us are closer to that position than being on the verge of imm…

Yea, you have some larger goals, Everyone does.

Are you going to track goals every 15 minutes? I doubt it.

Re: I logged my activities at 15-minute intervals for the whole year

#179

Post by ntsplnkv2 »

nitrogen wrote: post #86
Draiken wrote: post #49

I am always baffled how sad this extreme focus into productivity makes me. If you discovered you were going to die in a year, would you continue to spend all your time being "productive"? I figure almost everyone would shift all their focus on doing things that "really matter". Sadly I believe the world managed to make us feel guilty when we're not doing something that makes someone else rich (majority of jobs). I'm…

I think if you were going to die in a year you would stop doing everything with a payoff more than a few months in the future. It's a mistake to think that what "really matters" is whatever pays off now instead of later. When you have longer to live, it makes sense to work now to get more of what "really matters" five, ten, and twenty years down the line.

It's not about payoffs.

I really challenge anyone to say with a straight face that they'd say on their deathbed "I wish I would have done more spreadsheets on the minutae of my life."

Re: I logged my activities at 15-minute intervals for the whole year

#180

Post by ntsplnkv2 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #171
whatshisface wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't paying someone else to raise your children... not raising children? It's like comparing a bank with actual gold in a vault and many expensive physical security measures with someone who owns a futures contract with no delivery.

People weren't meant to raise children in a nuclear family. It's a historical aberration. In the past, you'd offload some of your parenting to grandparents, aunts and neighbors in the village (and the latter would do the same, creating a sort of distributed parenting environment). For urban population in modern times, daycare and babysitters serve as a replacement. Put another way, taking care of a young child is 16+…

When women weren't in the workforce it was a much easier time to raise children.

Now women have to work so that they can have a lower middle class life. Daycare has risen because of this - not because of grandparents not watching their grandchildren.

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