Wasting time
Broadly construed, there are generally only two ways people spend their time*. Either they’re doing something that helps them achieve a certain goal (such as keeping one’s job or not starving or keeping the house clean or getting a degree or finding romance), or they’re doing something that interests them, without having a particular goal in mind. The latter kind of activies are often called “wasting time”.
*More technically, there is a binary, exhaustive, and fuzzy categorization of “ways to spend time” that is the only one relevant to my post.
But is time spent thusly a pure waste? I would say not. Such time is often spent learning new things about the world, or improving one’s skills or social connections. And experiences thus gained can make a person more interesting, and more able to enjoy life, and sometimes can unexpectedly affect the goals a person has and how they achieve them. If I had never spent any time of this quality, I can’t imagine how much poorer my life would be. Additionally, one’s activities in this time are often guided by unconscious goals, which can become more concrete and explicit over time.
So there is a genuine conflict in deciding how to spend time, between, let’s call it, work, in which one works toward particular, explicit goals, and play, which is undirected, allowing unconscious goals and pure Pavlovian conditioning take their course. (I make no other distinctions between the two—without knowledge of a person’s goals, it might be hard to tell one from the other. Hobbies count as work, and jobs often count as play, though not particularly uplifting play.)
Given that both work and play are necessary, the task that falls upon the student of productivity is balancing the two. I suppose the two main strategies to do this would be either to default to play, and only work when one feels like working, or to default to work: to carefully consider the value of play time, and allot it with care. It seems to me that the first strategy is the one most people follow, and one that works for many people. For instance, the large amount of time that workaholics spend at their jobs is not work, by my definitions, since it isn’t a step towards an explicitly considered goal. It’s really just unconsciously directed, and so it’s technically play.
Now, that’s not to say that those people would be more productive with explicitly considered goals driving their work. (While it’s probably true, it’s beside the point.) For people who have no such propensity for hard work, and who yet desire to work harder than they can under the “default to play” strategy, I believe it’s necessary to adopt the “default to work” strategy. Their life must be very goal oriented; their day-by-day and week-by-week activities planned, even defined, by a set of long-term goals, categorized and prioritized.
With this strategy, play can be allotted as follows: start out allowing a given amount of daily or weekly play time. (One could even alternate days, or otherwise schedule it creatively.) Stick to the schedule, closely, for a week. Decide whether to allot more or less time in the next week based on how bored you feel, and how satisfied your are with your progress toward your goals.
By consistently following this strategy, one can eliminate wasted time.
I’ve deliberately avoided getting into the complexities of goal-oriented planning, and the tricks of psychology necessary to stick to such a regime. I may get into these issues in later posts.
