"People fright at the concept of losing their money, yet they slave away their time without a second thought."<p>-Seneca the Younger, from Letters from a Stoic (highly recommended)<p>I think slaving away doing something you hate is far more harmful than "wasting" time having fun. I get more out of playing hacky sack and/or listening to podcasts than any homework or school work.<p>So, in relation to this article, I think we should maybe consider "losing time" as doing <i>anything</i> that you deeply don't want to do but are doing just to get more money.<p>The relationship between time and money is a fascinating one. Great article PG.
I think this ties into the idea of MMORPGs. I used to play them a lot until I realized they were not fun, just addictive; they make you feel like you're accomplishing something by leveling and gaining skills, when really it's only your character that's improving - you're not getting better at anything.
If Paul Graham realized that people can easily lose lots of money by investing, why did he devote himself to investing large amounts of his own money in high-risk businesses?<p>I'm not being facetious, I just think that seems contradictory. If I had a lot of money and that same knowledge, I would invest very conservatively.
Sometimes I think the feeling of getting "basically nothing" done by the end of the day is not the right timeframe - there are projects that have gone on for weeks that ultimately were a complete waste of time. But while working through those projects I felt something productive was happening, which made it difficult to think of them as "basically nothing". I'm not talking about failed ventures that could have turned into something great, these projects were pretty much always going to amount to nothing (they just appeared at the outset to be different to what they were)
I think for me this manifests itself in wasting time on reddit and twitter. Whenever I have a blank chrome tab, my unconscious reaction is to punch in one of these time-wasters.
Dealing with a shitload of emails is even considered to be the only social acceptable way to work in IT, so that losing time is now institutional. Rebel.
This is really a question of short-term gain versus long-term gain as well as tasks versus goals. For short-term fulfillment, we can entertain ourselves or keep ourselves occupied in some manner, regardless of whether it's productive.<p>The key is figuring out how it fits into our overall strategy or goals. Is that activity or task contributing to that long-term gain? More importantly, am I actively managing it as opposed to going on blind auto-pilot (e.g. for that investment or project)?<p>There's no substitute for hard work, just as there's no substitute for self-awareness.
One of my alarms is looking at my long-term objectives and see if my work made me move in the right direction. I have my objectives written down in a prominent place, so I can make sure I stay focused.
This is a very important article. Today, many people don't know anymore what well-spent time is. Distractions are everywhere around us ... but if you overcome them you are probably still on the wrong path. Everybody gets in this trap. One must learn and try to get out. Often, a conservative view combined with a high degree of openness is the only way to survive in this jungle of attention and still leave a trace in the dynamic space of tech.
I always thought that the best way to avoid losing a lot of money is to diversify and avoid leverage.
Derivatives is leverage big time, it's speculation, not investing, you can lose much more than you invested.
Diversify and avoiding leverage as a VC would be to invest a relatively small amount
of money over many potential companies.
So can avoiding leverage to conserve your investments work the same way with time?
Leverage as a small company might be like sub'ing out your work to others. I've never read anything positive with that approach.
How about at the personal level of the article -
some wasteful activities can be avoided but stuff like email is not going away.
So leverage this down time by multitasking. It would take me 4 hours of planning for 2 hour of programming.
While I wade thought these emails I am also going to think about, plan, research, and write down what my 2 hours of programming is going to be.
During these non productive downtimes, I can get really boring jobs done, the time passes quicker,
and I have a head start when my productive time starts.
I think a good simple way to determine whether I'm doing fake work or not is to ask myself two questions, "Is this challenging?" then "will this help me reach my goals?"<p>I find that if I say no to either then I'm probably doing fake work (or doing real work poorly).
This short essay is not pg at his best in my view. Spending time having fun is Plain Good, and necessary, even for the most focused startup founder. But watching TV don't count obviously. Playing cards with friends at a terasse does.