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How to Lose Time and Money

ojbyrne 16y ago
From the various stories about sports figures going broke, there's another obvious route - friends and family.
staunch 16y ago
Works for food too. Even if you completely avoid any obviously unhealthful food (cake, ice cream, candy), it's quite easy to get overweight eating large portions of normal food.
- pavs 16y ago
  Running with the food example. Earlier this year I started cooking food instead of eating out every single say, I saved some money and I am much more conscious about my eating habit. (self-plug) http://blogriot.com/maintaining-a-food-budget/ http://blogriot.com/maintaining-a-food-budget/
- swombat 16y ago
  To a point. It's a whole lot easier to get overweight eating lots of calorie-laced, nutritionally poor junk food, like pizza, junk burgers, sodas, fries, and the like, than to do so eating large quantities of freshly cooked vegetables.
  - eru 16y ago
    I just started eating more and more food. I usually try to go healthy, but in a pinch I'll get a Mars bar from our vending machine. (I even trained myself to drink milk and eat bananas. Things that I did not like before.) Since I started weightlifting, I need the extra energy to keep my weight, and perhaps even gain some.
- ellyagg 16y ago
  That's only because people don't realize all the obviously unhealthful foods and mistakenly believe many healthy foods are bad for you because they contain dietary fat. A baked potato is practically as bad for you as cake, weight-wise. On the other hand, it would be extremely difficult for most people to get fat eating large portions of pure meat because any sort of meat has such a low glycemic index. Any time my brother wants to lose weight, he goes to an all-bacon explosion diet[1] and the weight just melts off. Several people at my work went on the so-called paleo diet together and immediately started losing significant weight. If you look at most popular diets, they generally have the core effect of deemphasizing high glycemic foods from one's diet, usually by shifting calories to meat and/or vegetables. Personally, I prefer to shift the calories to meat because it's easier to build strength and muscle, when paired with an appropriate physical regimen. In my view, physical strength is an underappreciated and core component of modern fitness. [1] Slight exaggeration.
  - jmulho 16y ago
    For those who didn't catch ellyagg's point, I summarize. good: dietary fat, large portions of pure meat, any sort of meat, all-bacon explosion diet, so-called paleo diet, most popular diets bad: all the obviously unhealthful foods people don't realize, baked potato (as compared to cake, weight-wise), high glycemic foods underappreciated and core component of modern fitness: physical strength
  - DaniFong 16y ago
    FWIW, "The China Project," documented in the eponymous book, appears to show a dangerously strong correlation between meat intake/animal protein intake and cardiovascular problems, cancer, and dementia. This is possibly not true when the protein is going to work building flesh, but most americans consume vastly more protein in the diet than necessary.
  - Psyonic 16y ago
    I realize most people aren't terribly fit, but in what sense do you think physical strength is underappreciated? I think most people are well aware of the benefits, they just don't care enough to bother.
- megablast 16y ago
  I am pretty sure you would have to do no exercise at all for that to be true. One of the benefits of exercising is that once you start doing it regularly, you start to miss it when you stop it. If I don't go for a run every day, I feel it, despite the fact that I hate running.
travem 16y ago
The point about the lack of "alarm bells" raised while doing busy work really resonates with me. Its so easy to get in the habit of context switching between multiple inputs (email, twitter, …) that if you don't strictly time box it you can easily lose a few hours. And don't get me started on meetings…
tansey 16y ago
I sense a bit of irony here: the guy who started HN is telling you not to waste your time by sitting around being unproductive... and you are seeing this article because you are on HN. :)
- deleted 16y ago
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- howcool 16y ago
  Of all the things to do online, HN is probably the one thing that is not a waste of time
- nickpinkston 16y ago
  Haha - quite true. Though it must be said that, after a streak of productivity, a break is prudent. HN is some of the most productive downtime I get to enjoy. Besides, PG put the "procrastination settings" in here for a reason ;-)
  - nostrademons 16y ago
    Didn't the article just warn you about downtime that we think is productive? ;-)
  - whimsy 16y ago
    Where is the documentation for noprocrast, maxvisit, minaway, delay?
    - steveklabnik 16y ago
      noprocrast is the switch that turns it on and off, maxvisit minites is the longest you're allowed to look before you get kicked off for minaway minutes. I forget what delay does.
      - kgermino 16y ago
        Delay is the amount of time (in minutes) between when you hit submit and when the comment is posted, its for people (like me) who post something than immediately decide to edit it. From http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html: ...There's a new "delay" field in your profile that lets you specify the delay (in minutes) between when you create a comment and when it's visible to others; this was added because many users edit comments immediately after posting them. Also 7 Nov: Anti-procrastination features Like email, social news sites can be dangerously addictive. So the latest version of Hacker News has a feature to let you limit your use of the site. There are three new fields in your profile, noprocrast, maxvisit, and minaway. (You can edit your profile by clicking on your username.) Noprocrast is turned off by default. If you turn it on by setting it to "yes," you'll only be allowed to visit the site for maxvisit minutes at a time, with gaps of minaway minutes in between. The defaults are 20 and 180, which would let you view the site for 20 minutes at a time, and then not allow you back in for 3 hours. You can override noprocrast if you want, in which case your visit clock starts over at zero.
MikeCapone 16y ago
That's something I've been thinking about a lot. I don't have millions, but what I have I want to a) not lose and b) make it grow. There's always a tension between these two things, and I'm afraid that if I take too many risks trying to do good on b), I might end up doing badly on a). It's hard to decide how much risk you should be taking...
ttol 16y ago
This post reminds me of the story I read of a Canadian billionaire who overcame this issue. Before he made big decisions, he wrote out on the notepad pros/cons and weighted each point with a number from 1-5, depending on how important each was to him. Then he would total it, and the side with the highest number wins. He did this from broke to billionaire and the story says he uses it to this day. What are some HN'ers methods for keeping time & money?
- nostrademons 16y ago
  I often write out the pros and cons, weight them, do out the calculations, and then ignore them and go with my gut instinct. There's some evidence that this is more effective than going strictly with the numbers. Our unconscious minds are often able to process more information than our conscious minds are: there're details that we're aware of, but don't know that we're aware of. They get missed in the calculation, but get included by a gut check. The reason for writing out all the pros and cons, even if you throw them away later, is to force yourself to think about all the relevant facts that you can. There's a difference between issues you've never thought about and issues that you've thought about but can't hold in your head all at once. Plans are useless, but planning is essential.
  - njl 16y ago
    Frequently, when I'm uncertain or ambivalent about a binary decision, I'll flip a coin. When the coin lands, I feel that moment of happiness or annoyance at the result. I then use that feeling to make my decision. If I realize that I really don't care, I just go with the result of the coin flip.
    - prawn 16y ago
      I've been known to quote for clients by rolling dice.
aresant 16y ago
Shameless plug for one of my favorite startups: See http://www.RescueTime.com http://www.RescueTime.com :) EDIT: Wow - did anybody that downvoted me actually read the article? The conclusion of the article is 100% that we need to get better about managing our time. Time slips away like CRAZY - I am a RescueTime user, a fan, and nothing more - it's a great service in the right direction for what the article just underlined as a critical problem!
- kristiandupont 16y ago
  I didn't downvote, but I think that RescueTime is of little help with what he describes here, at least in some situations. I remember Eric Ries describing his implementing a ton of features for their chat-thing, only to find no market for it. Realizing that he might as well have been on vacation was pretty hard for him.
  - Splines 16y ago
    Sounds interesting. Here's the interview, in case others are interested in reading further (purely for productive reasons, of course): http://mixergy.com/ries-lean/ http://mixergy.com/ries-lean/
jdc 16y ago
This reminds me Cal Newport's "pseudo-work" http://www.calnewport.com/blog/2007/07/26/the-straight-a-gospels-pseudo-work-does-not-equal-work http://www.calnewport.com/blog/2007/07/26/the-straight-a-gos...
r00k 16y ago
Reading that essay felt like improving my life. Fortunately, it was fun.
obama123789 16y ago
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nreece 16y ago
Small correction PG: Just thinking about it makes we wince. should be Just thinking about it makes me wince.
- deleted 16y ago
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- pg 16y ago
  Thanks, fixed. (Weird how it took me about 20 sec to see the difference.)
  - sliverstorm 16y ago
    Not only do the words sound similar and mean similar things (well, opposite- but to be opposite they must be related), but m is w upside down :)
    - drx 16y ago
      A guy I know has a form of dyslexia (though I'm not sure this is the correct word) that makes him initially unaware (for a few seconds) of the difference between E and ∃ (and other vertically mirrored characters) Imagine the horror of graph theory for him (e.g. ∃x,y E(x,y), etc.)
      - techiferous 16y ago
        In the first alphabets, the letters didn't have a particular orientation. There was even this strange (to us) writing system of writing every other line as a mirror image. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boustrophedon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boustrophedon
        BrandonM 16y ago
        Wow, that actually seems more sensible than our style. It would save time scanning back to the beginning of the next line, and it would make it harder to end up on the wrong line, since different lines would be going different directions.
markbao 16y ago
Fantastic article. Now to just get to that "have money" stage.
- sliverstorm 16y ago
  Put another way; ahh... to have rich people problems...
- Periodic 16y ago
  Now to start asking myself, "why am I wasting all my time?" We all have the same 24 hours in a day.
reader5000 16y ago
The other similarity between time and money is uncertainty. It is not usually apparent (especially for those self-employed) where to sink their available time so that it is most productive. Do I learn language X or Y? Project A or B? etc.
bhewes 16y ago
It is hard to know exactly what fake work is looking forward, but it is easy looking backwards. Which means you must test your assumptions continually over time. As what was real work in the past can easily turn into fake work. PG's "Alarm Bells" idea seems to be a good start.
mmaunder 16y ago
Right on!
rdamico 16y ago
My personal experience: Sometimes you catch yourself in a state where you keep getting stuck in "fake work" mode no matter how hard you try to be productive. When this happens, take it as a sign that you may be approaching burnout (especially for those who try to cram insane amounts of work into the day), and GO RELAX / HAVE FUN (and don't feel guilty about it). Either way you're going to lose some "real work" time, but at least this way you'll be doing something that will help you refocus and be more productive the next time you sit down to work.
cosmok 16y ago
Great read! I wish PG starts writing essays that are both short(emphasis on short) and interesting to read as this one.
deleted 16y ago
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sgoraya 16y ago
>But the world has gotten more complicated: the most dangerous traps now are new behaviors that bypass our alarms about self-indulgence by mimicking more virtuous types. That really resonated with me. Regularly looking at my phone and similar devices for news/stock/random updates provides me an illusion of productivity when it is not much more than self-indulgence.
Aegean 16y ago
IMHO this sentence: "And yet I've definitely had days when I might as well have sat in front of a TV all day" could have been rephrased to be clearer to describe days lost without watching TV but equally unproductive. Its rather subtle to get first time.
thunk 16y ago
> The most dangerous traps now are new behaviors that bypass our alarms about self-indulgence by mimicking more virtuous types. The flip-side is true, too: Many of us enjoy coding so much that it feels self-indulgent, tripping the alarm incorrectly. I've often guilted myself out of coding -- out of getting real work done -- because I enjoy it so much. So while we need to watch out for pseudo-work masquerading as real work, we also need to watch out for real work seeming like too much fun.
- patio11 16y ago
  Unfortunately, coding can be a non-productive use of time. If you're not taking active steps against it becoming so, it is probably a non-productive use of time. This is one of the core insights of the Lean Startup folks that is valuable to all of us: building stuff does not necessarily move the needle for the business, and the difficulty of building stuff bears no relation whatsoever to the business benefits realized by building it.
  - nostrademons 16y ago
    That depends whether your goal is business success or becoming a better coder. :-)
  - thunk 16y ago
    Sometimes I wonder, though, if methods like Lean Startup aren't solidifications of this very illusion: that just building something awesome and slightly gonzo is too much fun to be trusted. Lean Startups tend to miss things people don't know they want, or that yield negative results when market-tested with crappy prototypes. It's like "Design by Focus Group". It's probably safer. The success rate is probably higher. But I think you pay for it in loss of craziness. At any rate, startups either don't need to hear this, or shouldn't listen to it.
  - JesseAldridge 16y ago
    If something is hard to build, it's probably going to be more scarce. That would tend to make the thing more valuable. Your point is good, but "no relation whatsoever" seems a bit too strong.
scotty79 16y ago
> Whereas if you start trading derivatives, you can lose a million dollars (as much as you want, really) in the blink of an eye. > ... > Investing bypasses those alarms. You're not spending the money; you're just moving it from one asset to another. Which is why people trying to sell you expensive things say "it's an investment." "Investing" in derivatives is like buying million dollars in lottery tickets. Same way you could "invest" in forex or short do stock trading daily. You are not investing while doing those things. You just happily buy risk who someone with more wit and better ways of estimating it is selling. If I were to say how fortunes are lost I'd point to gambling. And, yes, gambling includes "investing" in risky things you actually know about no more than the person who is selling them. And I'm talking about actual knowledge, not about your gut feeling and things you think you know better.
- rchi 16y ago
  I don't know if you can differentiate between gambling and investing in real life. Both activities involve making bets with certain payoff and certain probability in mind. It's often really difficult to know the actual risk you were exposed to and whether your probability assessments were reasonably accurate.
  - scotty79 16y ago
    I'm sure that you can somehow differentiate between investing in government bonds and "investing" in forex. Maybe there is no sharp distinction between one and the other but I think there is a spectrum of actions between investing and gambling.
    - rchi 16y ago
      I agree with you that there is a spectrum of risk taking from gambling to investing. Nevertheless both involve taking risk and expecting payoff sometime in the future. Both the estimate of risk and estimate of payoff could be wrong or could change dynamically. I wouldn't be surprised if some argue that US government bonds are more risky than investing a diversified portfolio of forex today.
eande 16y ago
And surfing in the internet for the latest and greatest is one my biggest time waster. Although knowing it trying to avoid it, somehow time just clicks by so quickly reading too many articles.
jjs 16y ago
The most dangerous traps now are new behaviors that bypass our alarms about self-indulgence by mimicking more virtuous types. I quit playing all Facebook games when I realized why they are so bad for me: so many of them are glorified work simulators (virtual farms, restaurants, crime empires, etc.) that falsely satisfy that part of the brain that wants to get some work done!
- vdm 16y ago
  Perhaps then the solution is to make the work more like these games. Which makes a lot of it a UX challenge.
  - Kliment 16y ago
    Now that is a brilliant idea! A friend once had a project proposal to do that for team management (transferring football manager simulators to real life, essentially) but it never got funded.
- Tycho 16y ago
  Maybe our most effective strategy is pre-emptive avoidance? I've never played any of those Facebook games, in fact I never joined a social networking site at all for years, because I KNEW it would be a time sink. I like computer games but i've sworn never to even TRY World of Warcraft. I felt pretty stupid about trying EVE Online (I was intrigued by the business aspects) but turns out it's very boring anyway. So my point is, recognize in advance the time-wasting potential of prospective activities, and that will save you some grief. Another strategy: treat these activities like tradable items, like currently I'm considering "Buy: iPad, Sell: Xbox 360" and then the net effect of a new gizmo should be nullified.
  - ww520 16y ago
    I still remember how much time I spent playing the first generation of RPG, like Bard's Tales and Ultima 1/2/3. After a couple of these episodes, I tended to avoid these kinds of games because of the huge time commitment. It felt like a pain to start learning and playing huge time-sink games. I have been cured since then.
nopassrecover 16y ago
How do you deal with the opposite problem - employment or just making money feels like a waste of time?
melling 16y ago
Why not try to capture some of the Hacker News talent and create a crowd sourced Hacker News project? I little bit of everyone's time could add up to something interesting, and perhaps useful.
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skbohra 16y ago
A very useful time management technique for programmers. http://www.pomodorotechnique.com/ http://www.pomodorotechnique.com/
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axiom 16y ago
A corollary is when it feels like you've just wasted a bunch of time, when in fact you got a lot of work done. A common example of this is when you spend 18 hours trying a dozen solutions to a very hard problem, with none of them working. At the end of it all you tend to feel like a failure because nothing worked, but in reality you went through the very necessary process of narrowing your solution space and learning about the problem. I guess in general our emotion mechanisms misfire a lot.
- lsb 16y ago
  The "tortured academic" motif is especially problematic; academics are mostly employed to expand the sum total of all world knowledge, but it's often supremely frustrating.
- phugoid 16y ago
  That wouldn't be a corollary, as it doesn't follow readily from the point he made.
- staunch 16y ago
  This is much harder to stomach when 18 hours is 18 weeks or 18 months. It's still just as true though.
- robryan 16y ago
  This always frustrates me, if I try 3 different ways to do something of which 2 are dead ends and one works I feel that the 2 dead ends were wasted time because very little of them ended up in the final solution.
  - kragen 16y ago
    One benefit of this kind of work is that the two dead ends don't end up as pieces of code you have to maintain thereafter.
  - henryford 16y ago
    On the other hand you needed those 2 dead ends in order to establish that one way, and only one way, is the right one. You cannot expect yourself to be that foresightet.
SapphireSun 16y ago
I wonder if cooking falls under this category. I feel like I should do it to save money, but I wonder if I spent the time doing something better, I would have a net win.
- Kliment 16y ago
  So do it for fun, and stop treating it like something that needs justification. If it's not fun, figure out why, and either start having fun or stop doing it.
lvecsey 16y ago
I don't think anything is really ever lost so long as you support the system by remaining a US citizen. Losses in the financial markets and in business just get carried forward, at the very least in terms of experience. It feels like time is being wasted but I think that's just an illusion from the Obama doctrine of spreading the wealth around; at some point down the line, money will be made again hand over fist to both confirm the system is in play and that people are being taken advantage of.
ww520 16y ago
Actually my thought is that the "fake" work is just part of life. What are real work and what are fake work? If real work means the work that supports the bare minimum you need to survive, then everything else are fake. All the extra money, fame, and success are just there to stoke your ego. People got their ego stoked by playing Farmville. Are those fake work? I would say just enjoy life, every part of it, fake or real.
DanielBMarkham 16y ago
There's a cognitive load -- an amount of brain-work -- that we have today that we didn't have even 30 years ago. Let me explain. Paul uses the day-spent-emailing example. The crazy thing is, I don't know if spending a day emailing is a good use of a person's time or not -- although I get his point. Selling life insurance? Maybe 8 hours on email nets you a dozen leads. Could be a great use of time. Swapping smalltalk with 40 people you haven't seen in a year? Maybe yes. Maybe no. Sad fact is, the thing you are doing -- emailing, Facebooking, blogging, writing an essay, etc -- is not a great descriptor anymore of whether it's actually useful to you or not. You sit on the couch and play video games or watch TV for 10 years, and (in my opinion) you've wasted time. But if you don't email, don't communicate, don't participate electronically -- you've also wasted time. I've had a lot of questions about time management lately. I find it's a much more complicated subject than money management. With money, there is a number you can look at. Did you make more money? Did you spend a lot? With time, it just keeps flowing along, and it seems like you're always trying to maximize it before it's gone. But I'm not really sure there is such a thing as "maximize" Covey had a great book on time management a decade or so ago. Need to dig that up and take another look at it.
Ardit20 16y ago
"With time, as with money, avoiding pleasure is no longer enough to protect you." I think Paul Graham is an amateur philosopher and the problem with philosophy is that it is not actually easy to do. This is so as it is very easy to speak of a truth in one particular focused narration, which very much contradicts with other circumstances. The quote above being an example in point. Why would anyone want to avoid pleasure, let alone be protected from it? I think watching telly for two hours can be pleasure, it is more difficult however to find out of when it becomes not self indulgment but not pleasure. The riches of the world are useless entirely if they do not grant you access to pleasure. The entire point of existence is pleasure. Making money is pleasure, disciplining yourself to not waste time is done so as to gain more pleasure later than very little now, spending a lot of money is pleasure, as is making them, and of course the greatest pleasure of them all is sex so have plenty of it :P My point Paul is that we do not need protection for pleasure. To the contrary, we need protection from non pleasure. It is however extremely hard firstly to identify what is pleasurable and secondly to acquire it. Investment for example can be pleasurable but only if you make a profit out of it and you feel comfortable with making the investment. That is, you can afford to loose what you invest and thus can only gain pleasure either way. When, however, large sums of money are invested, outside of that comfort zone, you are not protecting yourself from pleasure, you are instead denying yourself pleasure and giving in to its enemies, such as envy, irrational hope, lack of discipline, too much confidence in yourself or others while the alarm bell inside does ring so very softly that this might really not be right. Thus perhaps, time and money should not be our currency, but pleasure.
- futuremint 16y ago
  I would also like to point out that I feel pleasure after working through a day in a disciplined way that doesn't waste time. So "disciplining yourself not to waste time" isn't always to gain pleasure later, but can also generate direct pleasure. At least for me. (my $0.02)
- Shorel 16y ago
  > My point Paul is that we do not need protection for pleasure. To the contrary, we need protection from non pleasure. I think this is exactly the point PG was making.
adamilardi 16y ago
http://www.adamandtiffy.com/blog/if-by-rudyard-kipling http://www.adamandtiffy.com/blog/if-by-rudyard-kipling If you can make one heap of all your winnings And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss, And lose, and start again at your beginnings And never breathe a word about your loss; -Rudyard Kipling I've recently seen this as a challenge to keep pushing forward even after you've had great success. This is similar to PG's challenge of investing his hard earned money. He had a heap of his winnings. He could store the cash in a bank and forget it or risk it (intelligently of course). The author IMO implies by saying to start over undeterred by loss or defeat that it's better to take the chance than to hang on the sidelines. I do doubt that Paul would "never breathe a word of his loss" after all they didn't have the internet back then :) Thanks for the essay.
- ajtaylor 16y ago
  Thanks for the reminder about "If". I had to memorize it way back in... 6th grade I think? It's a marvelous poem.
dean 16y ago
"the alarms that prevent you from overspending are so basic that they may even be in our DNA" "avoiding pleasure is no longer enough to protect you. It probably was enough to protect hunter-gatherers, and perhaps all pre-industrial societies" These feelings of wasting time and avoiding pleasure are probably more due to culture than genetics. They sound like a description of the Puritan Work Ethic.
barmstrong 16y ago
So how does PG invest his money? I was kinda surprised because I thought the article was going there, with some basic advice about how not to lose it in investments. But it took a turn in focus.
vag 16y ago
I propose to call that "Investment Fallacy".

From the various stories about sports figures going broke, there's another obvious route - friends and family.

Works for food too. Even if you completely avoid any obviously unhealthful food (cake, ice cream, candy), it's quite easy to get overweight eating large portions of normal food.

pavs 16y ago
Running with the food example. Earlier this year I started cooking food instead of eating out every single say, I saved some money and I am much more conscious about my eating habit. (self-plug) http://blogriot.com/maintaining-a-food-budget/ http://blogriot.com/maintaining-a-food-budget/
swombat 16y ago
To a point. It's a whole lot easier to get overweight eating lots of calorie-laced, nutritionally poor junk food, like pizza, junk burgers, sodas, fries, and the like, than to do so eating large quantities of freshly cooked vegetables.
- eru 16y ago
  I just started eating more and more food. I usually try to go healthy, but in a pinch I'll get a Mars bar from our vending machine. (I even trained myself to drink milk and eat bananas. Things that I did not like before.) Since I started weightlifting, I need the extra energy to keep my weight, and perhaps even gain some.
ellyagg 16y ago
That's only because people don't realize all the obviously unhealthful foods and mistakenly believe many healthy foods are bad for you because they contain dietary fat. A baked potato is practically as bad for you as cake, weight-wise. On the other hand, it would be extremely difficult for most people to get fat eating large portions of pure meat because any sort of meat has such a low glycemic index. Any time my brother wants to lose weight, he goes to an all-bacon explosion diet[1] and the weight just melts off. Several people at my work went on the so-called paleo diet together and immediately started losing significant weight. If you look at most popular diets, they generally have the core effect of deemphasizing high glycemic foods from one's diet, usually by shifting calories to meat and/or vegetables. Personally, I prefer to shift the calories to meat because it's easier to build strength and muscle, when paired with an appropriate physical regimen. In my view, physical strength is an underappreciated and core component of modern fitness. [1] Slight exaggeration.
- jmulho 16y ago
  For those who didn't catch ellyagg's point, I summarize. good: dietary fat, large portions of pure meat, any sort of meat, all-bacon explosion diet, so-called paleo diet, most popular diets bad: all the obviously unhealthful foods people don't realize, baked potato (as compared to cake, weight-wise), high glycemic foods underappreciated and core component of modern fitness: physical strength
- DaniFong 16y ago
  FWIW, "The China Project," documented in the eponymous book, appears to show a dangerously strong correlation between meat intake/animal protein intake and cardiovascular problems, cancer, and dementia. This is possibly not true when the protein is going to work building flesh, but most americans consume vastly more protein in the diet than necessary.
- Psyonic 16y ago
  I realize most people aren't terribly fit, but in what sense do you think physical strength is underappreciated? I think most people are well aware of the benefits, they just don't care enough to bother.
megablast 16y ago
I am pretty sure you would have to do no exercise at all for that to be true. One of the benefits of exercising is that once you start doing it regularly, you start to miss it when you stop it. If I don't go for a run every day, I feel it, despite the fact that I hate running.

travem 16y ago

The point about the lack of "alarm bells" raised while doing busy work really resonates with me. Its so easy to get in the habit of context switching between multiple inputs (email, twitter, …) that if you don't strictly time box it you can easily lose a few hours. And don't get me started on meetings…

tansey 16y ago

I sense a bit of irony here: the guy who started HN is telling you not to waste your time by sitting around being unproductive... and you are seeing this article because you are on HN. :)

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howcool 16y ago
Of all the things to do online, HN is probably the one thing that is not a waste of time
nickpinkston 16y ago
Haha - quite true. Though it must be said that, after a streak of productivity, a break is prudent. HN is some of the most productive downtime I get to enjoy. Besides, PG put the "procrastination settings" in here for a reason ;-)
- nostrademons 16y ago
  Didn't the article just warn you about downtime that we think is productive? ;-)
- whimsy 16y ago
  Where is the documentation for noprocrast, maxvisit, minaway, delay?
  - steveklabnik 16y ago
    noprocrast is the switch that turns it on and off, maxvisit minites is the longest you're allowed to look before you get kicked off for minaway minutes. I forget what delay does.
    - kgermino 16y ago
      Delay is the amount of time (in minutes) between when you hit submit and when the comment is posted, its for people (like me) who post something than immediately decide to edit it. From http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html: ...There's a new "delay" field in your profile that lets you specify the delay (in minutes) between when you create a comment and when it's visible to others; this was added because many users edit comments immediately after posting them. Also 7 Nov: Anti-procrastination features Like email, social news sites can be dangerously addictive. So the latest version of Hacker News has a feature to let you limit your use of the site. There are three new fields in your profile, noprocrast, maxvisit, and minaway. (You can edit your profile by clicking on your username.) Noprocrast is turned off by default. If you turn it on by setting it to "yes," you'll only be allowed to visit the site for maxvisit minutes at a time, with gaps of minaway minutes in between. The defaults are 20 and 180, which would let you view the site for 20 minutes at a time, and then not allow you back in for 3 hours. You can override noprocrast if you want, in which case your visit clock starts over at zero.

MikeCapone 16y ago

That's something I've been thinking about a lot. I don't have millions, but what I have I want to a) not lose and b) make it grow. There's always a tension between these two things, and I'm afraid that if I take too many risks trying to do good on b), I might end up doing badly on a). It's hard to decide how much risk you should be taking...

ttol 16y ago

This post reminds me of the story I read of a Canadian billionaire who overcame this issue. Before he made big decisions, he wrote out on the notepad pros/cons and weighted each point with a number from 1-5, depending on how important each was to him. Then he would total it, and the side with the highest number wins. He did this from broke to billionaire and the story says he uses it to this day. What are some HN'ers methods for keeping time & money?

nostrademons 16y ago
I often write out the pros and cons, weight them, do out the calculations, and then ignore them and go with my gut instinct. There's some evidence that this is more effective than going strictly with the numbers. Our unconscious minds are often able to process more information than our conscious minds are: there're details that we're aware of, but don't know that we're aware of. They get missed in the calculation, but get included by a gut check. The reason for writing out all the pros and cons, even if you throw them away later, is to force yourself to think about all the relevant facts that you can. There's a difference between issues you've never thought about and issues that you've thought about but can't hold in your head all at once. Plans are useless, but planning is essential.
- njl 16y ago
  Frequently, when I'm uncertain or ambivalent about a binary decision, I'll flip a coin. When the coin lands, I feel that moment of happiness or annoyance at the result. I then use that feeling to make my decision. If I realize that I really don't care, I just go with the result of the coin flip.
  - prawn 16y ago
    I've been known to quote for clients by rolling dice.

aresant 16y ago

Shameless plug for one of my favorite startups: See http://www.RescueTime.com http://www.RescueTime.com :) EDIT: Wow - did anybody that downvoted me actually read the article? The conclusion of the article is 100% that we need to get better about managing our time. Time slips away like CRAZY - I am a RescueTime user, a fan, and nothing more - it's a great service in the right direction for what the article just underlined as a critical problem!

kristiandupont 16y ago
I didn't downvote, but I think that RescueTime is of little help with what he describes here, at least in some situations. I remember Eric Ries describing his implementing a ton of features for their chat-thing, only to find no market for it. Realizing that he might as well have been on vacation was pretty hard for him.
- Splines 16y ago
  Sounds interesting. Here's the interview, in case others are interested in reading further (purely for productive reasons, of course): http://mixergy.com/ries-lean/ http://mixergy.com/ries-lean/

jdc 16y ago

This reminds me Cal Newport's "pseudo-work" http://www.calnewport.com/blog/2007/07/26/the-straight-a-gospels-pseudo-work-does-not-equal-work http://www.calnewport.com/blog/2007/07/26/the-straight-a-gos...

r00k 16y ago

Reading that essay felt like improving my life. Fortunately, it was fun.

obama123789 16y ago

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nreece 16y ago

Small correction PG: Just thinking about it makes we wince. should be Just thinking about it makes me wince.

deleted 16y ago
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pg 16y ago
Thanks, fixed. (Weird how it took me about 20 sec to see the difference.)
- sliverstorm 16y ago
  Not only do the words sound similar and mean similar things (well, opposite- but to be opposite they must be related), but m is w upside down :)
  - drx 16y ago
    A guy I know has a form of dyslexia (though I'm not sure this is the correct word) that makes him initially unaware (for a few seconds) of the difference between E and ∃ (and other vertically mirrored characters) Imagine the horror of graph theory for him (e.g. ∃x,y E(x,y), etc.)
    - techiferous 16y ago
      In the first alphabets, the letters didn't have a particular orientation. There was even this strange (to us) writing system of writing every other line as a mirror image. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boustrophedon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boustrophedon
      - BrandonM 16y ago
        Wow, that actually seems more sensible than our style. It would save time scanning back to the beginning of the next line, and it would make it harder to end up on the wrong line, since different lines would be going different directions.

markbao 16y ago

Fantastic article. Now to just get to that "have money" stage.

sliverstorm 16y ago
Put another way; ahh... to have rich people problems...
Periodic 16y ago
Now to start asking myself, "why am I wasting all my time?" We all have the same 24 hours in a day.

reader5000 16y ago

The other similarity between time and money is uncertainty. It is not usually apparent (especially for those self-employed) where to sink their available time so that it is most productive. Do I learn language X or Y? Project A or B? etc.

bhewes 16y ago

It is hard to know exactly what fake work is looking forward, but it is easy looking backwards. Which means you must test your assumptions continually over time. As what was real work in the past can easily turn into fake work. PG's "Alarm Bells" idea seems to be a good start.

mmaunder 16y ago

Right on!

rdamico 16y ago

My personal experience: Sometimes you catch yourself in a state where you keep getting stuck in "fake work" mode no matter how hard you try to be productive. When this happens, take it as a sign that you may be approaching burnout (especially for those who try to cram insane amounts of work into the day), and GO RELAX / HAVE FUN (and don't feel guilty about it). Either way you're going to lose some "real work" time, but at least this way you'll be doing something that will help you refocus and be more productive the next time you sit down to work.

cosmok 16y ago

Great read! I wish PG starts writing essays that are both short(emphasis on short) and interesting to read as this one.

deleted 16y ago

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sgoraya 16y ago

>But the world has gotten more complicated: the most dangerous traps now are new behaviors that bypass our alarms about self-indulgence by mimicking more virtuous types. That really resonated with me. Regularly looking at my phone and similar devices for news/stock/random updates provides me an illusion of productivity when it is not much more than self-indulgence.

Aegean 16y ago

IMHO this sentence: "And yet I've definitely had days when I might as well have sat in front of a TV all day" could have been rephrased to be clearer to describe days lost without watching TV but equally unproductive. Its rather subtle to get first time.

thunk 16y ago

> The most dangerous traps now are new behaviors that bypass our alarms about self-indulgence by mimicking more virtuous types. The flip-side is true, too: Many of us enjoy coding so much that it feels self-indulgent, tripping the alarm incorrectly. I've often guilted myself out of coding -- out of getting real work done -- because I enjoy it so much. So while we need to watch out for pseudo-work masquerading as real work, we also need to watch out for real work seeming like too much fun.

patio11 16y ago
Unfortunately, coding can be a non-productive use of time. If you're not taking active steps against it becoming so, it is probably a non-productive use of time. This is one of the core insights of the Lean Startup folks that is valuable to all of us: building stuff does not necessarily move the needle for the business, and the difficulty of building stuff bears no relation whatsoever to the business benefits realized by building it.
- nostrademons 16y ago
  That depends whether your goal is business success or becoming a better coder. :-)
- thunk 16y ago
  Sometimes I wonder, though, if methods like Lean Startup aren't solidifications of this very illusion: that just building something awesome and slightly gonzo is too much fun to be trusted. Lean Startups tend to miss things people don't know they want, or that yield negative results when market-tested with crappy prototypes. It's like "Design by Focus Group". It's probably safer. The success rate is probably higher. But I think you pay for it in loss of craziness. At any rate, startups either don't need to hear this, or shouldn't listen to it.
- JesseAldridge 16y ago
  If something is hard to build, it's probably going to be more scarce. That would tend to make the thing more valuable. Your point is good, but "no relation whatsoever" seems a bit too strong.

scotty79 16y ago

> Whereas if you start trading derivatives, you can lose a million dollars (as much as you want, really) in the blink of an eye. > ... > Investing bypasses those alarms. You're not spending the money; you're just moving it from one asset to another. Which is why people trying to sell you expensive things say "it's an investment." "Investing" in derivatives is like buying million dollars in lottery tickets. Same way you could "invest" in forex or short do stock trading daily. You are not investing while doing those things. You just happily buy risk who someone with more wit and better ways of estimating it is selling. If I were to say how fortunes are lost I'd point to gambling. And, yes, gambling includes "investing" in risky things you actually know about no more than the person who is selling them. And I'm talking about actual knowledge, not about your gut feeling and things you think you know better.

rchi 16y ago
I don't know if you can differentiate between gambling and investing in real life. Both activities involve making bets with certain payoff and certain probability in mind. It's often really difficult to know the actual risk you were exposed to and whether your probability assessments were reasonably accurate.
- scotty79 16y ago
  I'm sure that you can somehow differentiate between investing in government bonds and "investing" in forex. Maybe there is no sharp distinction between one and the other but I think there is a spectrum of actions between investing and gambling.
  - rchi 16y ago
    I agree with you that there is a spectrum of risk taking from gambling to investing. Nevertheless both involve taking risk and expecting payoff sometime in the future. Both the estimate of risk and estimate of payoff could be wrong or could change dynamically. I wouldn't be surprised if some argue that US government bonds are more risky than investing a diversified portfolio of forex today.

eande 16y ago

And surfing in the internet for the latest and greatest is one my biggest time waster. Although knowing it trying to avoid it, somehow time just clicks by so quickly reading too many articles.

jjs 16y ago

The most dangerous traps now are new behaviors that bypass our alarms about self-indulgence by mimicking more virtuous types. I quit playing all Facebook games when I realized why they are so bad for me: so many of them are glorified work simulators (virtual farms, restaurants, crime empires, etc.) that falsely satisfy that part of the brain that wants to get some work done!

vdm 16y ago
Perhaps then the solution is to make the work more like these games. Which makes a lot of it a UX challenge.
- Kliment 16y ago
  Now that is a brilliant idea! A friend once had a project proposal to do that for team management (transferring football manager simulators to real life, essentially) but it never got funded.
Tycho 16y ago
Maybe our most effective strategy is pre-emptive avoidance? I've never played any of those Facebook games, in fact I never joined a social networking site at all for years, because I KNEW it would be a time sink. I like computer games but i've sworn never to even TRY World of Warcraft. I felt pretty stupid about trying EVE Online (I was intrigued by the business aspects) but turns out it's very boring anyway. So my point is, recognize in advance the time-wasting potential of prospective activities, and that will save you some grief. Another strategy: treat these activities like tradable items, like currently I'm considering "Buy: iPad, Sell: Xbox 360" and then the net effect of a new gizmo should be nullified.
- ww520 16y ago
  I still remember how much time I spent playing the first generation of RPG, like Bard's Tales and Ultima 1/2/3. After a couple of these episodes, I tended to avoid these kinds of games because of the huge time commitment. It felt like a pain to start learning and playing huge time-sink games. I have been cured since then.

nopassrecover 16y ago

How do you deal with the opposite problem - employment or just making money feels like a waste of time?

melling 16y ago

Why not try to capture some of the Hacker News talent and create a crowd sourced Hacker News project? I little bit of everyone's time could add up to something interesting, and perhaps useful.

deleted 16y ago

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skbohra 16y ago

A very useful time management technique for programmers. http://www.pomodorotechnique.com/ http://www.pomodorotechnique.com/

deleted 16y ago

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axiom 16y ago

A corollary is when it feels like you've just wasted a bunch of time, when in fact you got a lot of work done. A common example of this is when you spend 18 hours trying a dozen solutions to a very hard problem, with none of them working. At the end of it all you tend to feel like a failure because nothing worked, but in reality you went through the very necessary process of narrowing your solution space and learning about the problem. I guess in general our emotion mechanisms misfire a lot.

lsb 16y ago
The "tortured academic" motif is especially problematic; academics are mostly employed to expand the sum total of all world knowledge, but it's often supremely frustrating.
phugoid 16y ago
That wouldn't be a corollary, as it doesn't follow readily from the point he made.
staunch 16y ago
This is much harder to stomach when 18 hours is 18 weeks or 18 months. It's still just as true though.
robryan 16y ago
This always frustrates me, if I try 3 different ways to do something of which 2 are dead ends and one works I feel that the 2 dead ends were wasted time because very little of them ended up in the final solution.
- kragen 16y ago
  One benefit of this kind of work is that the two dead ends don't end up as pieces of code you have to maintain thereafter.
- henryford 16y ago
  On the other hand you needed those 2 dead ends in order to establish that one way, and only one way, is the right one. You cannot expect yourself to be that foresightet.

SapphireSun 16y ago

I wonder if cooking falls under this category. I feel like I should do it to save money, but I wonder if I spent the time doing something better, I would have a net win.

Kliment 16y ago
So do it for fun, and stop treating it like something that needs justification. If it's not fun, figure out why, and either start having fun or stop doing it.

lvecsey 16y ago

I don't think anything is really ever lost so long as you support the system by remaining a US citizen. Losses in the financial markets and in business just get carried forward, at the very least in terms of experience. It feels like time is being wasted but I think that's just an illusion from the Obama doctrine of spreading the wealth around; at some point down the line, money will be made again hand over fist to both confirm the system is in play and that people are being taken advantage of.

ww520 16y ago

Actually my thought is that the "fake" work is just part of life. What are real work and what are fake work? If real work means the work that supports the bare minimum you need to survive, then everything else are fake. All the extra money, fame, and success are just there to stoke your ego. People got their ego stoked by playing Farmville. Are those fake work? I would say just enjoy life, every part of it, fake or real.

DanielBMarkham 16y ago

There's a cognitive load -- an amount of brain-work -- that we have today that we didn't have even 30 years ago. Let me explain. Paul uses the day-spent-emailing example. The crazy thing is, I don't know if spending a day emailing is a good use of a person's time or not -- although I get his point. Selling life insurance? Maybe 8 hours on email nets you a dozen leads. Could be a great use of time. Swapping smalltalk with 40 people you haven't seen in a year? Maybe yes. Maybe no. Sad fact is, the thing you are doing -- emailing, Facebooking, blogging, writing an essay, etc -- is not a great descriptor anymore of whether it's actually useful to you or not. You sit on the couch and play video games or watch TV for 10 years, and (in my opinion) you've wasted time. But if you don't email, don't communicate, don't participate electronically -- you've also wasted time. I've had a lot of questions about time management lately. I find it's a much more complicated subject than money management. With money, there is a number you can look at. Did you make more money? Did you spend a lot? With time, it just keeps flowing along, and it seems like you're always trying to maximize it before it's gone. But I'm not really sure there is such a thing as "maximize" Covey had a great book on time management a decade or so ago. Need to dig that up and take another look at it.

Ardit20 16y ago

"With time, as with money, avoiding pleasure is no longer enough to protect you." I think Paul Graham is an amateur philosopher and the problem with philosophy is that it is not actually easy to do. This is so as it is very easy to speak of a truth in one particular focused narration, which very much contradicts with other circumstances. The quote above being an example in point. Why would anyone want to avoid pleasure, let alone be protected from it? I think watching telly for two hours can be pleasure, it is more difficult however to find out of when it becomes not self indulgment but not pleasure. The riches of the world are useless entirely if they do not grant you access to pleasure. The entire point of existence is pleasure. Making money is pleasure, disciplining yourself to not waste time is done so as to gain more pleasure later than very little now, spending a lot of money is pleasure, as is making them, and of course the greatest pleasure of them all is sex so have plenty of it :P My point Paul is that we do not need protection for pleasure. To the contrary, we need protection from non pleasure. It is however extremely hard firstly to identify what is pleasurable and secondly to acquire it. Investment for example can be pleasurable but only if you make a profit out of it and you feel comfortable with making the investment. That is, you can afford to loose what you invest and thus can only gain pleasure either way. When, however, large sums of money are invested, outside of that comfort zone, you are not protecting yourself from pleasure, you are instead denying yourself pleasure and giving in to its enemies, such as envy, irrational hope, lack of discipline, too much confidence in yourself or others while the alarm bell inside does ring so very softly that this might really not be right. Thus perhaps, time and money should not be our currency, but pleasure.

futuremint 16y ago
I would also like to point out that I feel pleasure after working through a day in a disciplined way that doesn't waste time. So "disciplining yourself not to waste time" isn't always to gain pleasure later, but can also generate direct pleasure. At least for me. (my $0.02)
Shorel 16y ago
> My point Paul is that we do not need protection for pleasure. To the contrary, we need protection from non pleasure. I think this is exactly the point PG was making.

adamilardi 16y ago

http://www.adamandtiffy.com/blog/if-by-rudyard-kipling http://www.adamandtiffy.com/blog/if-by-rudyard-kipling If you can make one heap of all your winnings And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss, And lose, and start again at your beginnings And never breathe a word about your loss; -Rudyard Kipling I've recently seen this as a challenge to keep pushing forward even after you've had great success. This is similar to PG's challenge of investing his hard earned money. He had a heap of his winnings. He could store the cash in a bank and forget it or risk it (intelligently of course). The author IMO implies by saying to start over undeterred by loss or defeat that it's better to take the chance than to hang on the sidelines. I do doubt that Paul would "never breathe a word of his loss" after all they didn't have the internet back then :) Thanks for the essay.

ajtaylor 16y ago
Thanks for the reminder about "If". I had to memorize it way back in... 6th grade I think? It's a marvelous poem.

dean 16y ago

"the alarms that prevent you from overspending are so basic that they may even be in our DNA" "avoiding pleasure is no longer enough to protect you. It probably was enough to protect hunter-gatherers, and perhaps all pre-industrial societies" These feelings of wasting time and avoiding pleasure are probably more due to culture than genetics. They sound like a description of the Puritan Work Ethic.

barmstrong 16y ago

So how does PG invest his money? I was kinda surprised because I thought the article was going there, with some basic advice about how not to lose it in investments. But it took a turn in focus.

vag 16y ago

I propose to call that "Investment Fallacy".