18 ms·

The Busy Person’s Lies

226 points by dwynings 10y ago

dijit 10y ago
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.
- ryandrake 10y ago
  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.
  - thefalcon 10y ago
    I just constantly find myself out of the zone with a family/kids around.
    - zeveb 10y ago
      Hence the utility of having some people in a family specialise in staying in the zone, and others specialise in handling child-based interrupts, not entirely different from having one CPU devoted to main processing tasks and other processing units handling ancillary tasks. During the nuclear-family era, the idea was that dad would specialise in in-zone work and mom would specialise in interrupt servicing, but both before and after I think it was rather more fluid.
      - cmdrfred 10y ago
        Prior to that children were vastly more independent as well.
        Jtsummers 10y ago
        Contemporary (starting in the 50s at least) suburban living styles makes letting your kids be that independent very difficult. Not just the hyperbolic fear that some have about child safety, but just what they can do locally without needing a parent or older sibling to drive them. Setting aside rural/country living where your neighbors were miles away, urban (large or small city) living was more centered around local shops, parks, and other environments. Now they live in a sea of houses, and have to travel way outside it to get to other activities or free space like woods and parks for play.
        cmdrfred 10y ago
        Are you attempting to imply that cities did not exist 50 years ago? I'll think you'll find that not only did they exist children were far more autonomous in them. The fact is helicopter parents have won the day.
        Jtsummers 10y ago
        The explosion in suburban-style living happened (in the US) largely post-WWII, [EDIT: starting] in or around the 1950s. That's the shift I'm referring to. Living in suburbs makes it easy for kids to wander the streets (parents feel it's safe), but the design (or lack thereof) of many of them make it difficult for kids to be "independent". It's hard to be a 12-year old who wanders to the local candy store to spend your allowance when the nearest shop like that is 10 miles away because of suburban sprawl. Some areas did a better job than others of trying to make their suburbs more like towns with local shops, theaters, and such. But many did not. Cities certainly have existed for ages, and they did allow for children to be quite autonomous. It's the post city move to the suburbs (setting aside the helicopter parent cultural shift we've had) that created a large impact on the availability of options for kids to act as independent people. Additionally, for teens, suburbs make having their own jobs very challenging (though it can reward the entrepreneurial few who start their own service businesses like lawn mowing or raking). Again, short a car, suburbs make life difficult for them, they require the assistance of their parents or others to transport them around, which reduces their autonomy.
  - eppp 10y ago
    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.
  - BinaryIdiot 10y ago
    > 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. While basically true it's been 6 years since we had our first kid (we're have two now) and I'm still not very good at context switching.
  - Retra 10y ago
    But what are you actually doing in those 15-minute slots? What is your standard of productivity? I've never met someone with kids who was able to work as effectively as I am at the subjects I work on in the presence of their kids. I mean, I have a girlfriend I only see on weekends, and that's already a huge drain on my productive time. It's made me noticeably dumber.
- Jill_the_Pill 10y ago
  And so much time getting from thing to thing! Drop the kids at school by 7:30, go home and shower and eat quick, run downtown to work, pop out for a meeting and get back, stop home and eat, off to grocery store -- well, two actually because neither one has the entire list -- then back, quick nap (timer, 15 min), edit kid's essay draft, keep cats from killing each other, run out and pick up first shift of kids after school, home to let in furnace repair guy, back out to get kid's hair cut, stop to buy batteries and get cash and gas during haircut, pick up second shift after school, back home, do last night's dishes and make dinner, take kid to evening activity (an hour in traffic), swim while he's there, shower at the Y, pick kid up, and home again to eat dinner at 9. Partner's in NY at work til late, but this is a very typical day of no-research-accomplished-whatsoever, and really I ought to fit in "make tomorrow's dinner" later tonight because tomorrow looks too full already.
uberstuber 10y ago
“To me, ‘busy’ implies that the person is out of control of their life.” – Derek Sivers
- huhtenberg 10y ago
  Derek's wrong, of course.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  Well, I am out of control of my life. Because I need money to live, and so does my family. So I'm slaving the days away.
  - coldtea 10y ago
    Sure. People that need to work to feed their family (as opposed to working by choice, on things they like at their own terms, and having the financial support to not work for years on end) are out of control of their life in that regard (they have to be somewhere for 8+ hours each workday, they cant change places unless they found a job at the new place, etc).
- Florin_Andrei 10y ago
  He sounds like he's great friends with whoever said "let them eat cake instead".
rudolf0 10y ago
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 having ample time for those hobbies.
- cortesoft 10y ago
  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.
cpwalker 10y ago
From the article: "I think that time tracking deserves a try. A life is lived in hours. What we do with our lives will be a function of how we spend those hours, and we get only so many." It's high-status to be busy. Time tracking, while useful for some, is more likely to be a way for people to play the status game.
- fossuser 10y ago
  I agree on the status point - talking about how 'busy' you are is basically bragging about your status. I suspect the working poor or people who actually have less control over their time are more likely to say they're exhausted/tired/overwhelmed than 'busy'. Busy to me is someone just advertising they're important.
JPKab 10y ago
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 10y ago
  [deleted]
- apsec112 10y ago
  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.
  - cmdrfred 10y ago
    I come from poverty. There is a big difference between poor and working poor. The poor get handouts, the working poor get fines because they can't afford Obamacare. Then people wonder why the poor don't struggle their way to working poor.
    - rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
      Whoever downvoted this comment doesn't understand it at all. The working poor are a revenue source. By keeping people indebted, they remain predictable consumers and fixed-income assets, like a human bond. The impoverished are effectively trapped by the welfare system itself, because it reduces benefits as incomes rise at a faster rate than can be made up by the equivalent amount of work. If the minimum wage was a living wage, like in Australia, then this wouldn't be a problem. But instead American welfare/min-wage clearly incentivizes staying just poor enough to keep getting benefits, or else you are actively making yourself poorer by working more. This is why so many Walmart employees are on food stamps.
twoquestions 10y ago
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.
- misterman101 10y ago
  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.
- Jtsummers 10y ago
  YNMT (You need more time)? Offer a similar "budgeting" experience as YNAB, but constrained (you literally have 24 hours a day, no more, no less). Create categories and subcategories. Work - Programming, Meetings, blech; Meals - Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, Preparation, Shopping; Kids - Transport, playing with, working with; Home - Bathroom, Kitchen, Floors, Mowing; Financial - Bills, Budgeting. Open the app and log your time, specifying the appropriate category. Reallocate time. You wanted to spend 24 hours at the lake this month (rented a cabin, camping), but you needed to clean the gutters and forgot about it so you go to the lake later on Saturday, not first thing in the morning. Would be able to generate reports at different levels of granularity, like a budgeting/accounting app can. Generate a daily, colored, chart so you can see where in each day you spend time (or don't for unaccounted for time) and identify trends and problems (I go to bed between 8pm and 11pm, maybe I should make that more regular).
- skav 10y ago
  We are trying to do this at Smarter Time with 99% automatic tracking. We just launched our first version (on Android) so there are still some rough edges, but this is our end goal.
tboyd47 10y ago
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.
- greenshackle2 10y ago
  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.
  - jostmey 10y ago
    too of much of my day is spent on stupid stuff. Time must be guarded carefully--cut out all the crap
  - tboyd47 10y ago
    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. Different strokes, I guess!
    - comboy 10y ago
      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.
Jtsummers 10y ago
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.
- Kenji 10y ago
  I can't squeeze more than 4-6 hours of intellectually productive hours out of a day. I may delude myself into thinking I can do more, but it's not sustainable.
  - pc86 10y ago
    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.
    - Kenji 10y ago
      Software Design is intellectually productive. If you aren't, you are not designing and implementing software.
      - jgord 10y ago
        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.
chillingeffect 10y ago
This is going to be devastating to feminists: "I have found that for women especially, it is the best antidote to the pernicious narrative that professional success requires harsh sacrifices at home." and "... a narrative of craziness, the sort professional women in particular tell one another as we compete in the Misery Olympics,"
- qntty 10y ago
  How so?
  - chillingeffect 10y ago
    Well, think about it: These quotes minimize the legitimate problems women face. It authoritatively relabels the real concerns women have in communicating their struggles as "crazy" and a "misery olympics." It tells women their experiences are a superficial social game rather than actual problems. Feminism has been trying to instruct the world as the seriousness of women balancing careers and family life, but this article tells them these stories, based on real experiences of learning and coping are just "pernicious narratives." After reading this article, they're going to have to battle uphill to regain ground lost by this (ironically) woman telling them the issues they face are "lies."
SilasX 10y ago
Reminds me of the WSJ's infographic of tax-hike impacts and the forlorn expressions on their faces. http://i.huffpost.com/gen/944732/original.jpg http://i.huffpost.com/gen/944732/original.jpg
- foenix 10y ago
  That is shockingly out of touch.
- andruby 10y ago
  Wow, those income numebers are insane. Was that a sarcastic infographic or was it serious one?
  - SilasX 10y ago
    Can't find a direct non-paywall link, but here's the discussion with links: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/16/wall-street-journal-middle-class_n_2488893.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/16/wall-street-journal... (A bit suspicious now; none of them have direct links to the article.)
  - phd514 10y ago
    It was from this article on the upper middle class: http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2016/06/21/not-just-the-1-the-upper-middle-class-is-larger-and-richer-than-ever/ http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2016/06/21/not-just-the-1-the.... The HuffPo article conveniently omits "upper".
    - nerfhammer 10y ago
      I wouldn't call that upper "middle" class, I would just call that upper class...
      - Swizec 10y ago
        Upper class is when you no longer have a salary, just investments. Upper middle is when you have a high salary and some investments, but your main source of income is still leveraging time and skill for money.
tra3 10y ago
Are there any suggestions for time tracking apps? Start-stop timers don't seem to fit me very well: I fall off the wagon real quick. I also tried reporterapp (www.reporter-app.com) but that didn't last long either. Any advice?
beyondfantasy 10y ago
Reading this made me want to watch an episode of Real Housewives.
bm98 10y ago
I have a time tracking code called "HN". 33.19 hours logged so far this year. I think it's time well spent...
eternal_intern 10y ago
In my experience, It's never time which is the problem, it's mental attention. Having 4 hours of free time at the end of a tiring day is meaningless if you don't have the mental energy to actually use it.
sjclemmy 10y ago
Fascinating. But there is something wrong with this analysis and I can't quite figure out what it is. Maybe there's a presumption that efficiency leads to happiness - it's not explicit but I'm sure it's hinting at it. I'm a big believer in not trying to fit too much in. As the author says, there are only so many hours in a life time, so actually experiencing it rather than trying to fill it is perhaps another way to look at it.
wolfspider 10y ago
I keep track of my own time quite well and don't really agree with the article at all in fact I started coming up with my own outlandish solutions. One of them is that I segment my sleep like people used to do before the Industrial Revolution. When I get off work I sleep for 2-3 hours and then go to bed much later for 3-5 hours. I've found that I used to waste more time preparing to try and sleep for 8 hour blocks than doing anything else. Now I just go to sleep when I'm actually tired along with the creativity boost you get between 1-3am when you segment your sleep. I'm not distracted during those hours because no one is still awake to distract me and the time becomes more useful.
- drdrey 10y ago
  What system do you use to keep track of your time?
neves 10y ago
Nice! We have a lot of time. Hey morons, stop whining and work more. This article represents a crazy mindset. We are not in the middle of the Industrial Revolution. Nobody should have to work so much any more. BTW. She has 4 weeks vacations.
koliber 10y ago
I've heard a great saying once: "Happiness is the difference between expectation and reality." The more time I think about it, the more I agree. I am starting to see that it applies to time as well. I used to feel like I have no free time. However, after thinking about it, it feels like that because I have big ambitions. I just want to do a lot. I want to do my job well, work on my side project, spend quality time with my wife and kids, keep the house in good shape, get myself into better shape, help those around me, cook and eat healthy, grow my tomatoes, develop my mind, entertain myself, read books, keep up with the news, socialize with friends, call mom and dad, travel the world, and also have time to be by myself and cultivate calmness through solitude. That is a lot. I've realized that I was demanding too much from myself. I made a conscious decision to lower my expectations of myself. I will still do all of the things above, and likely many more. I just won't try to do them this week, this month, or perhaps this year.
- huherto 10y ago
  >I've heard a great saying once: "Happiness is the difference between expectation and reality." The more time I think about it, the more I agree. In a similar note. I believe that it is has been shown that happiness is believing that the future will be better. So it more important to have positive expectation of the future than your present reality. Because you adapt to your present reality whatever it is but you always need to know that things will be better.
ChuckMcM 10y ago
I've never gone full log analysis on this question but several times in my career I've wondered "Am I really getting less done than I used to or am I mis-remembering the past?" Doing a surface analysis of that highlighted lots of places where I was doing something I wanted to do and later counting it as "wasted" time. So for example if I spent an hour watching a television show and later felt I had wasted an hour watching TV, I could go back and re-score that to "I wanted to watch television and I did, why are my priorities for that time different now than they were then?" And for me, there were two things that were key to me getting better with my time. One was to be explicit about my priorities, and the other is the bin packing problem. If you spend three hours on things, separated by 15 minutes between hours, you end up "losing" 45 minutes because 15 minutes is too short to spin up a new task but long enough to be meaningful. If I wanted to address the bin-packing problem then it meant being a lot more thoughtful about planning my use of time. And doing three one hour things back to back (with a plan to switch tasks at the earlier of "I'm done" or "it's been an hour" that coalesces the three 15 minute chunks into one 45 minute chunk which is enough time to watch an hour long TV show if you can skip all the commercials.
spoinkaroo 10y ago
What kind of systems do you guys use for time tracking, priority organization, and achieving goals/finding meaning? I've flittered around with various systems, but never settled on anything. (Planning out my week in advance, time tracking from 15 minute intervals to morning intervals with what I have during the day, to do lists organized by urgent+important // important // urgent // neither, etc. It can be overwhelming, but I strongly suspect a system that makes me cognizant of my behavior, decisions, and where I am adding/finding the most value is superior to having no system at all.
- parasubvert 10y ago
  I've found that a rough version of GTD has really helped me focus on "getting things done" when I feel i need structure because I am pulled in many different directions. Don't worry about all the self help material, it really is a simple workflow: https://goo.gl/images/R7ciME https://goo.gl/images/R7ciME From an overall "how to think and act effectively" philosophy, the original is still the best IMO: "The Effective Executive", by Peter Drucker, written in 1967. It contains very simple ideas, but I've found them to be tremendous life lessons on how to do the right things, rather than just doing things right.
binalpatel 10y ago
I've fallen into the busy trap pretty often lately. Busy to me - paradoxically - is correlated with not getting shit done. It's one thing to have a lot to do, and get 90% of the tasks done, and another to have a lot to do, and get 10% of the tasks done, with the other 90% rolling over onto the next day. It's the roll-over that's really the stressor for me, when I feel most "busy", and that creates a self-fulfilling prophecy for the next day, when you have that much more to do.
rosstex 10y ago
Is there a Chrome extension or program that does something like mentioned in the article, asking you every half-hour "what did you do this last half-hour?" I think that would be an effective way to get me logging my time.
ap22213 10y ago
The lack of time is really a perception caused by mental overload. Most people I know have extra time. They're just incredibly overwhelmed with the background noise of work. They have time, but extremely little of it is mentally useful time.
the_cat_kittles 10y ago
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?

226 points by dwynings 10y ago

dijit 10y ago

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.

ryandrake 10y ago
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.
- thefalcon 10y ago
  I just constantly find myself out of the zone with a family/kids around.
  - zeveb 10y ago
    Hence the utility of having some people in a family specialise in staying in the zone, and others specialise in handling child-based interrupts, not entirely different from having one CPU devoted to main processing tasks and other processing units handling ancillary tasks. During the nuclear-family era, the idea was that dad would specialise in in-zone work and mom would specialise in interrupt servicing, but both before and after I think it was rather more fluid.
    - cmdrfred 10y ago
      Prior to that children were vastly more independent as well.
      - Jtsummers 10y ago
        Contemporary (starting in the 50s at least) suburban living styles makes letting your kids be that independent very difficult. Not just the hyperbolic fear that some have about child safety, but just what they can do locally without needing a parent or older sibling to drive them. Setting aside rural/country living where your neighbors were miles away, urban (large or small city) living was more centered around local shops, parks, and other environments. Now they live in a sea of houses, and have to travel way outside it to get to other activities or free space like woods and parks for play.
        cmdrfred 10y ago
        Are you attempting to imply that cities did not exist 50 years ago? I'll think you'll find that not only did they exist children were far more autonomous in them. The fact is helicopter parents have won the day.
        Jtsummers 10y ago
        The explosion in suburban-style living happened (in the US) largely post-WWII, [EDIT: starting] in or around the 1950s. That's the shift I'm referring to. Living in suburbs makes it easy for kids to wander the streets (parents feel it's safe), but the design (or lack thereof) of many of them make it difficult for kids to be "independent". It's hard to be a 12-year old who wanders to the local candy store to spend your allowance when the nearest shop like that is 10 miles away because of suburban sprawl. Some areas did a better job than others of trying to make their suburbs more like towns with local shops, theaters, and such. But many did not. Cities certainly have existed for ages, and they did allow for children to be quite autonomous. It's the post city move to the suburbs (setting aside the helicopter parent cultural shift we've had) that created a large impact on the availability of options for kids to act as independent people. Additionally, for teens, suburbs make having their own jobs very challenging (though it can reward the entrepreneurial few who start their own service businesses like lawn mowing or raking). Again, short a car, suburbs make life difficult for them, they require the assistance of their parents or others to transport them around, which reduces their autonomy.
- eppp 10y ago
  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.
- BinaryIdiot 10y ago
  > 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. While basically true it's been 6 years since we had our first kid (we're have two now) and I'm still not very good at context switching.
- Retra 10y ago
  But what are you actually doing in those 15-minute slots? What is your standard of productivity? I've never met someone with kids who was able to work as effectively as I am at the subjects I work on in the presence of their kids. I mean, I have a girlfriend I only see on weekends, and that's already a huge drain on my productive time. It's made me noticeably dumber.
Jill_the_Pill 10y ago
And so much time getting from thing to thing! Drop the kids at school by 7:30, go home and shower and eat quick, run downtown to work, pop out for a meeting and get back, stop home and eat, off to grocery store -- well, two actually because neither one has the entire list -- then back, quick nap (timer, 15 min), edit kid's essay draft, keep cats from killing each other, run out and pick up first shift of kids after school, home to let in furnace repair guy, back out to get kid's hair cut, stop to buy batteries and get cash and gas during haircut, pick up second shift after school, back home, do last night's dishes and make dinner, take kid to evening activity (an hour in traffic), swim while he's there, shower at the Y, pick kid up, and home again to eat dinner at 9. Partner's in NY at work til late, but this is a very typical day of no-research-accomplished-whatsoever, and really I ought to fit in "make tomorrow's dinner" later tonight because tomorrow looks too full already.

uberstuber 10y ago

“To me, ‘busy’ implies that the person is out of control of their life.” – Derek Sivers

huhtenberg 10y ago
Derek's wrong, of course.
TeMPOraL 10y ago
Well, I am out of control of my life. Because I need money to live, and so does my family. So I'm slaving the days away.
- coldtea 10y ago
  Sure. People that need to work to feed their family (as opposed to working by choice, on things they like at their own terms, and having the financial support to not work for years on end) are out of control of their life in that regard (they have to be somewhere for 8+ hours each workday, they cant change places unless they found a job at the new place, etc).
Florin_Andrei 10y ago
He sounds like he's great friends with whoever said "let them eat cake instead".

rudolf0 10y ago

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 having ample time for those hobbies.

cortesoft 10y ago
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.

cpwalker 10y ago

From the article: "I think that time tracking deserves a try. A life is lived in hours. What we do with our lives will be a function of how we spend those hours, and we get only so many." It's high-status to be busy. Time tracking, while useful for some, is more likely to be a way for people to play the status game.

fossuser 10y ago
I agree on the status point - talking about how 'busy' you are is basically bragging about your status. I suspect the working poor or people who actually have less control over their time are more likely to say they're exhausted/tired/overwhelmed than 'busy'. Busy to me is someone just advertising they're important.

JPKab 10y ago

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 10y ago
[deleted]
apsec112 10y ago
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.
- cmdrfred 10y ago
  I come from poverty. There is a big difference between poor and working poor. The poor get handouts, the working poor get fines because they can't afford Obamacare. Then people wonder why the poor don't struggle their way to working poor.
  - rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
    Whoever downvoted this comment doesn't understand it at all. The working poor are a revenue source. By keeping people indebted, they remain predictable consumers and fixed-income assets, like a human bond. The impoverished are effectively trapped by the welfare system itself, because it reduces benefits as incomes rise at a faster rate than can be made up by the equivalent amount of work. If the minimum wage was a living wage, like in Australia, then this wouldn't be a problem. But instead American welfare/min-wage clearly incentivizes staying just poor enough to keep getting benefits, or else you are actively making yourself poorer by working more. This is why so many Walmart employees are on food stamps.

twoquestions 10y ago

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.

misterman101 10y ago
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.
Jtsummers 10y ago
YNMT (You need more time)? Offer a similar "budgeting" experience as YNAB, but constrained (you literally have 24 hours a day, no more, no less). Create categories and subcategories. Work - Programming, Meetings, blech; Meals - Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, Preparation, Shopping; Kids - Transport, playing with, working with; Home - Bathroom, Kitchen, Floors, Mowing; Financial - Bills, Budgeting. Open the app and log your time, specifying the appropriate category. Reallocate time. You wanted to spend 24 hours at the lake this month (rented a cabin, camping), but you needed to clean the gutters and forgot about it so you go to the lake later on Saturday, not first thing in the morning. Would be able to generate reports at different levels of granularity, like a budgeting/accounting app can. Generate a daily, colored, chart so you can see where in each day you spend time (or don't for unaccounted for time) and identify trends and problems (I go to bed between 8pm and 11pm, maybe I should make that more regular).
skav 10y ago
We are trying to do this at Smarter Time with 99% automatic tracking. We just launched our first version (on Android) so there are still some rough edges, but this is our end goal.

tboyd47 10y ago

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.

greenshackle2 10y ago
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.
- jostmey 10y ago
  too of much of my day is spent on stupid stuff. Time must be guarded carefully--cut out all the crap
- tboyd47 10y ago
  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. Different strokes, I guess!
  - comboy 10y ago
    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.

Jtsummers 10y ago

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.

Kenji 10y ago
I can't squeeze more than 4-6 hours of intellectually productive hours out of a day. I may delude myself into thinking I can do more, but it's not sustainable.
- pc86 10y ago
  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.
  - Kenji 10y ago
    Software Design is intellectually productive. If you aren't, you are not designing and implementing software.
    - jgord 10y ago
      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.

chillingeffect 10y ago

This is going to be devastating to feminists: "I have found that for women especially, it is the best antidote to the pernicious narrative that professional success requires harsh sacrifices at home." and "... a narrative of craziness, the sort professional women in particular tell one another as we compete in the Misery Olympics,"

qntty 10y ago
How so?
- chillingeffect 10y ago
  Well, think about it: These quotes minimize the legitimate problems women face. It authoritatively relabels the real concerns women have in communicating their struggles as "crazy" and a "misery olympics." It tells women their experiences are a superficial social game rather than actual problems. Feminism has been trying to instruct the world as the seriousness of women balancing careers and family life, but this article tells them these stories, based on real experiences of learning and coping are just "pernicious narratives." After reading this article, they're going to have to battle uphill to regain ground lost by this (ironically) woman telling them the issues they face are "lies."

SilasX 10y ago

Reminds me of the WSJ's infographic of tax-hike impacts and the forlorn expressions on their faces. http://i.huffpost.com/gen/944732/original.jpg http://i.huffpost.com/gen/944732/original.jpg

foenix 10y ago
That is shockingly out of touch.
andruby 10y ago
Wow, those income numebers are insane. Was that a sarcastic infographic or was it serious one?
- SilasX 10y ago
  Can't find a direct non-paywall link, but here's the discussion with links: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/16/wall-street-journal-middle-class_n_2488893.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/16/wall-street-journal... (A bit suspicious now; none of them have direct links to the article.)
- phd514 10y ago
  It was from this article on the upper middle class: http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2016/06/21/not-just-the-1-the-upper-middle-class-is-larger-and-richer-than-ever/ http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2016/06/21/not-just-the-1-the.... The HuffPo article conveniently omits "upper".
  - nerfhammer 10y ago
    I wouldn't call that upper "middle" class, I would just call that upper class...
    - Swizec 10y ago
      Upper class is when you no longer have a salary, just investments. Upper middle is when you have a high salary and some investments, but your main source of income is still leveraging time and skill for money.

tra3 10y ago

Are there any suggestions for time tracking apps? Start-stop timers don't seem to fit me very well: I fall off the wagon real quick. I also tried reporterapp (www.reporter-app.com) but that didn't last long either. Any advice?

beyondfantasy 10y ago

Reading this made me want to watch an episode of Real Housewives.

bm98 10y ago

I have a time tracking code called "HN". 33.19 hours logged so far this year. I think it's time well spent...

eternal_intern 10y ago

In my experience, It's never time which is the problem, it's mental attention. Having 4 hours of free time at the end of a tiring day is meaningless if you don't have the mental energy to actually use it.

sjclemmy 10y ago

Fascinating. But there is something wrong with this analysis and I can't quite figure out what it is. Maybe there's a presumption that efficiency leads to happiness - it's not explicit but I'm sure it's hinting at it. I'm a big believer in not trying to fit too much in. As the author says, there are only so many hours in a life time, so actually experiencing it rather than trying to fill it is perhaps another way to look at it.

wolfspider 10y ago

I keep track of my own time quite well and don't really agree with the article at all in fact I started coming up with my own outlandish solutions. One of them is that I segment my sleep like people used to do before the Industrial Revolution. When I get off work I sleep for 2-3 hours and then go to bed much later for 3-5 hours. I've found that I used to waste more time preparing to try and sleep for 8 hour blocks than doing anything else. Now I just go to sleep when I'm actually tired along with the creativity boost you get between 1-3am when you segment your sleep. I'm not distracted during those hours because no one is still awake to distract me and the time becomes more useful.

drdrey 10y ago
What system do you use to keep track of your time?

neves 10y ago

Nice! We have a lot of time. Hey morons, stop whining and work more. This article represents a crazy mindset. We are not in the middle of the Industrial Revolution. Nobody should have to work so much any more. BTW. She has 4 weeks vacations.

koliber 10y ago

I've heard a great saying once: "Happiness is the difference between expectation and reality." The more time I think about it, the more I agree. I am starting to see that it applies to time as well. I used to feel like I have no free time. However, after thinking about it, it feels like that because I have big ambitions. I just want to do a lot. I want to do my job well, work on my side project, spend quality time with my wife and kids, keep the house in good shape, get myself into better shape, help those around me, cook and eat healthy, grow my tomatoes, develop my mind, entertain myself, read books, keep up with the news, socialize with friends, call mom and dad, travel the world, and also have time to be by myself and cultivate calmness through solitude. That is a lot. I've realized that I was demanding too much from myself. I made a conscious decision to lower my expectations of myself. I will still do all of the things above, and likely many more. I just won't try to do them this week, this month, or perhaps this year.

huherto 10y ago
>I've heard a great saying once: "Happiness is the difference between expectation and reality." The more time I think about it, the more I agree. In a similar note. I believe that it is has been shown that happiness is believing that the future will be better. So it more important to have positive expectation of the future than your present reality. Because you adapt to your present reality whatever it is but you always need to know that things will be better.

ChuckMcM 10y ago

I've never gone full log analysis on this question but several times in my career I've wondered "Am I really getting less done than I used to or am I mis-remembering the past?" Doing a surface analysis of that highlighted lots of places where I was doing something I wanted to do and later counting it as "wasted" time. So for example if I spent an hour watching a television show and later felt I had wasted an hour watching TV, I could go back and re-score that to "I wanted to watch television and I did, why are my priorities for that time different now than they were then?" And for me, there were two things that were key to me getting better with my time. One was to be explicit about my priorities, and the other is the bin packing problem. If you spend three hours on things, separated by 15 minutes between hours, you end up "losing" 45 minutes because 15 minutes is too short to spin up a new task but long enough to be meaningful. If I wanted to address the bin-packing problem then it meant being a lot more thoughtful about planning my use of time. And doing three one hour things back to back (with a plan to switch tasks at the earlier of "I'm done" or "it's been an hour" that coalesces the three 15 minute chunks into one 45 minute chunk which is enough time to watch an hour long TV show if you can skip all the commercials.

spoinkaroo 10y ago

What kind of systems do you guys use for time tracking, priority organization, and achieving goals/finding meaning? I've flittered around with various systems, but never settled on anything. (Planning out my week in advance, time tracking from 15 minute intervals to morning intervals with what I have during the day, to do lists organized by urgent+important // important // urgent // neither, etc. It can be overwhelming, but I strongly suspect a system that makes me cognizant of my behavior, decisions, and where I am adding/finding the most value is superior to having no system at all.

parasubvert 10y ago
I've found that a rough version of GTD has really helped me focus on "getting things done" when I feel i need structure because I am pulled in many different directions. Don't worry about all the self help material, it really is a simple workflow: https://goo.gl/images/R7ciME https://goo.gl/images/R7ciME From an overall "how to think and act effectively" philosophy, the original is still the best IMO: "The Effective Executive", by Peter Drucker, written in 1967. It contains very simple ideas, but I've found them to be tremendous life lessons on how to do the right things, rather than just doing things right.

binalpatel 10y ago

I've fallen into the busy trap pretty often lately. Busy to me - paradoxically - is correlated with not getting shit done. It's one thing to have a lot to do, and get 90% of the tasks done, and another to have a lot to do, and get 10% of the tasks done, with the other 90% rolling over onto the next day. It's the roll-over that's really the stressor for me, when I feel most "busy", and that creates a self-fulfilling prophecy for the next day, when you have that much more to do.

rosstex 10y ago

Is there a Chrome extension or program that does something like mentioned in the article, asking you every half-hour "what did you do this last half-hour?" I think that would be an effective way to get me logging my time.

ap22213 10y ago

The lack of time is really a perception caused by mental overload. Most people I know have extra time. They're just incredibly overwhelmed with the background noise of work. They have time, but extremely little of it is mentally useful time.

the_cat_kittles 10y ago

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?