I agree with Sohum. Reddit actually got sufficiently egregious that
I’m no more likely to hit reddit in the middle of the day than to open
up hulu and start watching TV (not that that’s never happened – but
now I work in an office, which is a nice commitment device for not
wasting time too flamboyantly). Hacker News is another story – I need
to set up filters and alerts for Beeminder-related stuff on Hacker
News so I have less incentive to just browse it.
As to David Reiley’s question, I want to reduce this: smk – d – beeminder
Andy gave a nice example of that: You’re researching something on
stackoverflow and the next thing you know you’re looking at graphs of
your karma, or answering some unrelated question. Or you’re just
compulsively looking at your email and not letting yourself
concentrate on a piece of code or prose.
This reminds me of Sohum’s “shiny” goal (“spend less time on shiny things”).
Btw, I think it would be impossible to measure these things without
tagtime. Almost by definition it’s impossible to measure time spent
distracted – if you had the wherewithal to note the time then you
could’ve just stayed on task in the first place – except by
tagtime-style sampling.
PS: This also reminds me that Sohum gave permission to show you all
this delightful post-mortem he sent recently when he derailed on a
weight goal:
legit! post-mortem: this is exactly the contrapositive of the case
beeminder is meant to catch :P. Where I’ve had warning for, like,
yongs that I’m doing something wrong, but haven’t either a) done
something about it or b) adjusted my yellow brick road to match
(enough) (because adjusting the ybr feels like admitting failure, and
if I can just hang on one more week then maybe I’ll get back on
track, or something!)
On Wed, Oct 24, 2012 at 9:33 AM, Sohum Banerjea sohumb@gmail.com wrote:
I’m not sure the “things I’d take off my schedule to do” metric is useful.
For me, there is a certain fraction of the day in which I do not do work. I
can attempt to adjust it, and it does adjust, slowly, but I can’t eliminate
it altogether.
So, in a fairer reference class, the answer is clear: given that I’m not
going to spend 90 minutes productively anyway, I’d rather watch a good
movie than, say, browse Reddit[1]. And yet I very often find myself doing
the latter and not the former.
That, I think, is the form of akrasia Daniel is talking about. And, David,
if there are unscheduled periods of your day which you would rather spend
differently, then I think that would apply to you as well.
That said, yes, I’ve often made the choice of what to do instead by
scarcity heuristics… Thank you for alerting me to that!
-Sohum
[1] Even the reference class of easy, mind-unnecessary leisure time probably
has better things than Reddit…
On Oct 24, 2012 4:05 PM, “David Reiley” david@davidreiley.com wrote:
What are the things you guys are doing that, upon reflection, you think
are less important than watching good TV and movies? I often think “I
would like to watch more movies,” but I can’t say what things I would take
off my schedule in order to do it. I’m either unable to figure this out, or
I’m not really akratic.
There are at least 10x as many things I REALLY want to do (or feel I have
to do) as I actually have time for. So when I think to myself “I’m not
doing X enough,” that could just be a refection of scarcity. What I don’t
know is whether there’s some activity Y that I should substitute X for in
order to make myself better off.
David
On Wed, Oct 24, 2012 at 12:11 AM, Melanie Reeves Wicklow
melanie@beeminder.com wrote:
You’re not the single most bizarre akratic - cause I’m totally the
same way. This is why I only watch TV on my treadmill (Well, I have
done a little TV watching on the iPad in bed. Somehow, after going to
bed, it seems less time wasting to just watch til I fall asleep (never
mind that I know full well it’s keeping me awake longer than I’d
otherwise be, but I’m clearly sneaking in the TV watching since I was
unable to get a “round tuit” before going to bed.) Either way, I’m
using other circumstances like workout time and bedtime to force some
TV watching. Otherwise, I’d almost never do it.
Maybe just tie TV watching to some exercise you want to be doing like
using a bike trainer or jumping up and down or jumping jacks or
something (I once hula hooped through an hour show thinking I’d make
my abs nice and sore but was disappointed, abs were fine). For me,
wanting to see what happens in the next episode of a show makes me get
on the treadmill. But it also works the other way a little bit since I
have no desire to do my treadmill at home without some entertainment
so deciding I need to get a workout in forces the TV watching too.
I’m also completely unable plus have no desire to have TV on in the
background. (It’s like we’re related or something, Danny :-)) If I
turn a TV on, it’s because I will be able to be engrossed in it.
Otherwise, I won’t turn it on. If someone else turns it on, I’m
either bothered by the noise or end up accidentally engrossed.
Melanie
On Tue, Oct 23, 2012 at 5:25 PM, Daniel Reeves dreeves@beeminder.com
wrote:
I might be the single most bizarre akratic on earth but I’ve noticed
that I waste tons of time on stupid little distractions, yet rarely
watch movies or TV. Sitting down to do so seems like such an
extravagant use of time! I’ve already wasted so much of it! I can’t
possibly take 2 hours to watch a movie until I get a little more
caught up on work, I think. I never get it through my head that I
waste much more time, in aggregate, on stupid things. And there are a
lot of movies that really seem worth the time. Plus it’s good to just,
y’know, relax now and then.
In other words, I’ve decided I’m akratic about how little [sic] TV I
watch.
Over the past 5+ years, I’ve averaged 1.8 hours/week being passively
entertained (not counting youtube and such at my computer).
I’ve decided to try forcing myself to spend at least that much:
ent – d – beeminder
And as you can see I know have an emergency passive entertainment day.
Of course it’s also an emergency blog post day, and also hack night
(pomodoro poker!), so it looks like I’ll be derailing on the
entertainment goal.
We’ll see what kind of a pledge it takes to make me take it
seriously…
–
http://dreev.es – search://“Daniel Reeves”
Follow the Yellow Brick Road – http://beeminder.com
–
David Reiley is a Research Scientist at Google
Learn more about me at http://www.davidreiley.com
–
http://dreev.es – search://“Daniel Reeves”
Follow the Yellow Brick Road – http://beeminder.com
