How I procrastinate
A life is limited, and I want to use my time as efficiently as possible, always use time somewhat wisely. I believe most people don’t want to waste their time, but I know I’m not alone in frequently avoiding doing useful things with my time. Considering my life goals (which I’ll probably elaborate on in the future), and the fact that I’ve accepted that it’s completely unrealistic to be my personal ideal, I’ve found a few broad categories of activities that I consider “time well-enough spent”. These include doing chores, socializing, exercising, developing my own programs (usually web apps), and learning something.
Somehow I’ve ended up in the “learning something” category for most of my free time, but I have an extremely low barrier for what “learning” means. I browse Hacker News, since there’s always a new project, or interesting discussions (from which I could gain a wider general knowledge, learn some techniques etc.). I read bug reports and feature suggestions on Github and Mozilla’s Bugzilla for ideas and to know the current improvements in web development, listen to LiberalViewer for insights into American politics and for fun, read a couple of my country’s biggest news sites for current events. I also browse Planet Mozilla och Reddit, and occasionally watch Ted talks for dubious intellectual benefit.
In effect I’m just procrastinating. There is a point where the minimal effort I put into learning from what I read, simply isn’t enough for me to retain very much of the information I consume. In order to remember, you have to use what you learn. In my case, it might mean that I should spend at most half of the time I’m currently spending “learning”. I should spend my newly free time either programming, or simply relaxing. While aiming to reduce my “do nothing” time, I’ve also forgotten to relax. Will relaxing help me be more productive the rest of the time? And even if it doesn’t, would I become a more balanced person?
In the future, I might explicitly say, or at least explicitly tell myself, what I want, and intend, to do with my time. In the mean-time, I consider Hank Green’s video on how to do all the things, to be an essential source of inspiration. Whatever I eventually decide on, it’ll likely be modeled after Hank’s ideas.