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 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.