"People fright at the concept of losing their money, yet they slave away their time without a second thought."
-Seneca the Younger, from Letters from a Stoic (highly recommended)
I think slaving away doing something you hate is far more harmful than "wasting" time having fun. I get more out of playing hacky sack and/or listening to podcasts than any homework or school work.
So, in relation to this article, I think we should maybe consider "losing time" as doing anything that you deeply don't want to do but are doing just to get more money.
The relationship between time and money is a fascinating one. Great article PG.
>> I get more out of playing hacky sack and/or listening to podcasts than any homework or school work.
Do you? How do you know? Certainly it feels more fun, maybe you feel less stressed afterwards, but does this bias your decision making? Certainly in the long term you could be wrong.
I think this ties into the idea of MMORPGs. I used to play them a lot until I realized they were not fun, just addictive; they make you feel like you're accomplishing something by leveling and gaining skills, when really it's only your character that's improving - you're not getting better at anything.
I take issue with this. I think MMORPGs can be a LOT of fun. The problem is, like with anything, eventually it stops being fun and feels more like work. As soon as that happens, most people have the good sense to quit. However, MMORPGs have just enough "community" to keep some people playing long after the stopped enjoying it. I myself quit playing MMORPGs years ago and will readily admit I do not enjoy them anymore. But I can't deny the thrill I had when I first started playing through World of Warcraft when it first came out.
Did I get better at anything useful? Not really. But that's okay. There's more to life than an endless treadmill of getting better at things.
I had some roommates in college that played Diable II like beasts. Once, when they thought they were online but weren't, we heard a scream through the wall, "Fuck! I'm not getting any experience from this!"
We laughed for a while at that one while we browsed videos of people getting hurt on ebaum's world.
Diablo II is actually the one game I return to, time and time again - but not really so much for the game as the socialisation.
I've never had a battle.net account - instead I've always played co-operative LAN with friends. The madness and the glory, the "oh shit" moments where you start cursing under your breath and everybody else piles over to where you are to help, and the tactical analysis over pizza - that's what Diablo II's about for me.
I think the advent of MMORPGs with voice communication has made them much more social - a friend of mine who's a serious WoW player spends as much time talking about his guildmates as he does about the gameplay.
You basically described my life during junior high. That same type of phenomenon happened often before I finally convinced my Mom to upgrade to DSL, with the excuse that I could find homework help on AOL even quicker, which is true, but I had ulterior motives. I really just wanted to play Starcraft online with real people without a crappy connection.
I was a single child and had zero friends within a 3-mile radius. Video games were a close friend back then.
I felt this way a decade ago when my wife and I rented Season 1 of the show 24. I never enjoyed it, but felt strangely compelled to find out what happened in the next episode, and would stay up too late watching. After one season I decided that was enough of that addiction.
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
I didn't watch it because it got cliché pretty fast like LOST. The worst offender I reckon was Dragonball Z [0]. I realised this pattern and that greatly put me off many games and movies, eg WoW, FarmVille, etc. It was a grind. I want something novel.
[0] Do: Scream, build up tension, to be continued, until Infinity. Replace scream with drama (twists).
Ouch. I watched that back on TV a decade ago when I had no idea what I was getting into. Longest "15 minutes" ever. They're supposed to be fighting on a planet that's about to explode... but the planet patiently waits to blow up until their fight is over... which takes almost forever. Ugh.
Paul contrasts two situations, the first exemplified by the "watching TV all day" example, the second by "staying all day at the office doing busywork while not accomplishing much".
Playing MMORPGs all day seems rather like the first, not the second.
I do have to disagree with you. "busywork" makes it look like you're doing work. Often you can get away with it. You might very well be doing work but you're not really doing anything of value.
World of Warcraft can feel like work but you're not really trying to pass it off as work. If you managed to do that, who ever you work for certainly has some issues!
Same story for me as far as MMORPG's, Farmville and similar go. I get super addicted for a week and play probably 8 hours a day, then I just get bored. The whole thing is vaguely addicting, but ultimately completely uninteresting.
If I'm going to watch a character level up I'd much rather hit the gym. The increasing weights you can lift offer a nice chance for some nerdy analysis while you're also actually doing something useful.
I rarely engage in shameless self promotion, but this seems like an appropriate moment. My startup, Fitocracy, is built around the notion of loosely mapping the MMORPG experience to exercise and fitness. We've been getting fairly popular with the early adopter crowd and we've even been featured in XKCD and Penny-Arcade.
I'll chime in on this about how the gym worked for me. Do both strength training and aerobic exercise; both are good for you, and both will work to keep you healthy. I joined a gym that did CrossFit workouts which combines both styles of exercise, and have been doing so for the last 9 months.
I could never stay motivated at the gym on my own, whereas CrossFit is nice because it's run as a group class, and you typically have a coach that runs you through the exercises. It's a bit more expensive, but it's the only gym that I've ever actually stayed committed to.
As for results, I haven't lost any weight; but I've lost fat and gained a ton of muscle (it was extremely noticeable in my face.) I've also taken 2.5 inches off of my waist.
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 :)
I didn't really run any super advanced analytics. But when you're there 2 hours a day 6 days a week, it tends to stick in your mind when you're progressing and when you aren't.
But to give you a sense, it took me 3 years to go from 50kg to 64kg body weight (first ~8kg was in 6 months or so). 64 is my IBM limit so it's incredibly difficult to go up from that.
I could squat-lift 130kg, benchpress about 80kg, biceps curl around 25kg and so on ... it was epic.
I've since taken up boxing and in a way it's even awesomer.
I use a program called Beyond the White Board (http://beyondthewhiteboard.com/) it's $3/month. It's mainly built around CrossFit, but you could easily tailor it for your own workouts. Like a good geek, I tried to "roll my own" and use spreadsheets, but after 2-3 months I realized that the $3/month was a better usage of my resources.
I haven't gotten into them myself in that way, but many people who are into MMORPGs have a significant social aspect to it, not just level-grinding. I'm ambivalent about the question overall, but it doesn't seem inherently worse than the many other ways that people socialize and entertain themselves.
If Paul Graham realized that people can easily lose lots of money by investing, why did he devote himself to investing large amounts of his own money in high-risk businesses?
I'm not being facetious, I just think that seems contradictory. If I had a lot of money and that same knowledge, I would invest very conservatively.
He sold Viaweb for tens of millions, he invests low tens of thousands.
He warns that careless trading may lose money without setting off fear, he invests in companies he also guides them to try and help them succeed. He doesn't invest alone, the risk and decisions have other people he trusts watching or contributing. They turn down most of the applicants
I bet he does a lot more due diligence on his YC investments than in the investments he references in his essay. He not only scopes talent and recognizes talent but also grooms it with his network and mentorship. He actively manages his "investments" to lower risk and increase chances of success.
If people could talk to the managing team of the companies they invest in for just about 3 minutes, it would be a lot less risky and a lot less money would get lost.
Sometimes I think the feeling of getting "basically nothing" done by the end of the day is not the right timeframe - there are projects that have gone on for weeks that ultimately were a complete waste of time. But while working through those projects I felt something productive was happening, which made it difficult to think of them as "basically nothing". I'm not talking about failed ventures that could have turned into something great, these projects were pretty much always going to amount to nothing (they just appeared at the outset to be different to what they were)
Sometimes I think the feeling of getting "basically nothing" done by the end of the day is not the right timeframe - there are projects that have gone on for weeks that ultimately were a complete waste of time.
I suspect pg means that he spent the day checking / responding to e-mails, reading HN, maybe paying some bills, noodling around the Internet, checking e-mail again, and then discovering that it's getting close to bed time, rather than working on long-term projects where the work he's doing hasn't immediately borne fruit.
The Internet is particularly insidious in this respect, because reading HN, looking at the NYT, and so forth can feel work-like without actually accomplishing anything substantial.
The Internet is particularly insidious in this respect, because reading HN, looking at the NYT, and so forth can feel work-like without actually accomplishing anything substantial.
It's true, but it also builds vague background knowledge in a hard-to-quantify way (and I'm honestly not sure how it stacks up to the time invested). I very frequently find myself drawing on knowledge that I ran across during internet time-wasting, whether it was a relevant article I found on HN, or a Wikipedia article I found in one of those random-walk-through-link sessions (or the journal articles I found via the Wikipedia articles...). On the other hand, I also spend a lot of time "keeping up with the internet", so it's not free. But it's certainly shown up in papers I've published in my day job.
It's an interesting tradeoff; I'd say I'm less concentrated and diligent than most of my colleagues on what I'm "supposed to be doing", but I'm also more broadly aware of what's going on outside of our little academic bubble. They get more done on their main projects, but I'm the person to come to if you want to be pointed to relevant articles/libraries/demos/posts on $topic_foo. It's not even so much that it saves me time researching later, as that I'm not sure I'd even be able to make some of the cross-connections between subjects without this undirected information-gathering.
Your suspicion is probably true, but the example in the essay was considering wasted time akin to poorly invested money. Losing a day to email/HN is like losing a few dollars on a horse race compared to sinking half your fortune into a diamond mine in Zaire. Obviously, those losses per day add up, but I think its probably just as wise to learn how to watch out for the large time investments that are going to simply absorb resource without return yield.
I think for me this manifests itself in wasting time on reddit and twitter. Whenever I have a blank chrome tab, my unconscious reaction is to punch in one of these time-wasters.
Dealing with a shitload of emails is even considered to be the only social acceptable way to work in IT, so that losing time is now institutional. Rebel.
This is really a question of short-term gain versus long-term gain as well as tasks versus goals. For short-term fulfillment, we can entertain ourselves or keep ourselves occupied in some manner, regardless of whether it's productive.
The key is figuring out how it fits into our overall strategy or goals. Is that activity or task contributing to that long-term gain? More importantly, am I actively managing it as opposed to going on blind auto-pilot (e.g. for that investment or project)?
There's no substitute for hard work, just as there's no substitute for self-awareness.
I like this comment more then the article. The terms "waste time" are used but what does that mean? How do you define wasting time? Easy, you measure what you were doing to your long term goals. I't is easy to say that "playing game x" is wasting time, unless your goal is to be the worlds best player.
Of course if you set bad long term goals for yourself you maybe always be "wasting time."
One of my alarms is looking at my long-term objectives and see if my work made me move in the right direction. I have my objectives written down in a prominent place, so I can make sure I stay focused.
This is a very important article. Today, many people don't know anymore what well-spent time is. Distractions are everywhere around us ... but if you overcome them you are probably still on the wrong path. Everybody gets in this trap. One must learn and try to get out. Often, a conservative view combined with a high degree of openness is the only way to survive in this jungle of attention and still leave a trace in the dynamic space of tech.
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 think a good simple way to determine whether I'm doing fake work or not is to ask myself two questions, "Is this challenging?" then "will this help me reach my goals?"
I find that if I say no to either then I'm probably doing fake work (or doing real work poorly).
This short essay is not pg at his best in my view. Spending time having fun is Plain Good, and necessary, even for the most focused startup founder. But watching TV don't count obviously. Playing cards with friends at a terasse does.
You missed the point of the essay, playing cards or watching tv is compared to spending money on luxuries and doing busywork is compared to investment. The first two probably won't respectively take up ALL your time at the office or bankrupt you because they are both obviously BAD FOR YOU (in excess). The latter two can be perniciously compelling, even though they might respectively bankrupt you or waste all your time, because you're more easily fooled (by yourself or others) into thinking they're worthwhile.
There are many positive activities that can be both productive and fun, including a card game with friends. In that case, you are investing in to those relationships and fulfilling a very basic human desire for socialization.
It's not that you're not getting anything done. You're just getting different things done. Compare that to a day in front of the TV. Can you say you've gotten anything out of it? Did you learn anything? Were you able to relieve stress or relax? Perhaps in small quantities TV can provide those benefits, but would trading your entire day be worth it?
Now to take your card playing to an extreme, would it be beneficial for someone like the president to spend an entire day playing cards with non-political friends? Sure the president needs a vacation every once in a while, but assume that this is not a vacation day. There are many more important things that should be done, and even with the relaxation and socialization benefits that card playing with friends has, I believe the president's "wasting time" alarm would go off. There are elections to win and speeches to give. But what about spending an entire day reviewing a minor bill? Sure, bills are important. After all, the president should know about what new laws are being considered. Even so, an entire day could go by without the president thinking "this is a waste of time". After all, he's not playing. He's working.
> [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.
But isn't utility pleasure? If reading a novel gives you pleasure, then you derive utility from it. Same thing for playing cards. Investing into making yourself a better person is simply investing in future utility, ie. extra pleasure that you may be able to derive from being successful, owning a house, having stronger relationships, etc. These have to be balanced against the worth of immediate utility, which may mean that you'll spend a night playing cards with friends for some immediate pleasure, and the next night learning a language, in prevision of future rewards.
My impression is that you are reducing utilitarianism to a Mr Spock kind of pseudo-logical thinking. You seem to be forgetting that the ultimate goal of utilitarianism is happiness. It's not about gaining knowledge or even self-improvement. Playing cards for pure fun is not at odds with utilitarianism.
(Disclaimer: I am not a philosopher nor do I have more than a basic knowledge of utilitarianism)
Well, not sure I follow you on this terrain... Let's find something that we would agree is useless, and enjoyable. Maybe fishing alone and putting fish back in the river?
Or you would say that this is also useful. But then anything is useful and the word itself has no meaning (and become useless, hehe).
I may be too much influenced by Eastern streams of thoughts, where we have zen, taoism, etc., all saying that nothingness, emptiness, uselessness are things we should value more, because they are the ground on which everything grows. (Simple example: without silence on which a composer is building, no music is possible)
So, to go back to pg's essay, which is more of a short blog post, I found it was lacking an open door toward these possibilities that "lost time" is not always lost.
How would you measure the utility of something? I think our definitions of utility are not the same. I see utility as ANYTHING one derives usefulness from. Utility == value. Value is subjective. You value Zen. Taking the time to appreciate nothingness IS valuable to you, therefor spending the day meditating has utility to you.
The short essay isn't really about declaring activities to either be productive or wasted. It's about learning to identify "empty" activities that waste time with the false promise of being productive. Whether your time is wasted or productive is a personal matter for you to weigh against your own goals and values.
P.S. My apologies to anyone who might take offence to my poor understanding of Zen.
I have to disagree with the TV does not obviously not count part.
I will argue that whatching TV can be good, provided that you really enjoy it. There is nothing inherently better about reading a book over watching a show if you enjoy yourself.
The key is to actively choose something that you like to do and then do it. Don't watch TV mindlessly. But don't hang out with mindless friends either.
I don't really agree with the rest of your statement, but I don't think this was his best either. It's a keen observation, but I was expecting some advice or some more in-depth analysis. But blogging can be one of those things that keeps getting put off if you wait until you have a perfect essay.
The social aspect and the feeling of being in a living and breathing fantasy world is quite intoxicating at first. I do agree that you need to be mindful of the fact that it is just a game and should be played for fun. It is not an achievement and is not helping to further your life any more than any other form of entertainment. It can be very easy to sink a lot of time into those things, but they are fun while they last.
-Seneca the Younger, from Letters from a Stoic (highly recommended)
I think slaving away doing something you hate is far more harmful than "wasting" time having fun. I get more out of playing hacky sack and/or listening to podcasts than any homework or school work.
So, in relation to this article, I think we should maybe consider "losing time" as doing anything that you deeply don't want to do but are doing just to get more money.
The relationship between time and money is a fascinating one. Great article PG.