How Should I be Spending My Time?

Since this summer I’ve been reading a lot of blogs posts through Hacker News. Here’s some of my favorites from recent memory:

  • https://dynomight.net/
  • https://blog.codinghorror.com/
  • https://astralcodexten.substack.com/
  • http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html

I looked at my Screen Time utility on my phone and I’ve been spending ~10 hours per week reading HN, and that got me thinking about how I want to be spending my time.

My first thought was that HN was a net gain over scrolling Reddit memes for an equivalent time, but the fact that it’s more pallatible might be disincentivizing me from stopping myself. I also thought about the opportunity cost of scrolling through HN versus other things I could be doing, which reminded me of a conversation I had with my housemate last month, about a sort of “tierlist” of things you could be doing with your time. I think the idea is useful, but obviously real-life doesn’t fall into neat categories and their value isn’t independent of context, so whatever tiers I put stuff in are gonna be kinda fuzzy. That being said, here’s my list so far:

S-tier:

  • Deep conversation (world-view, aspirations, struggles)
  • Working on a project that spurs personal growth. Favorites so far:
    • My Eagle Scout Project
    • Spotify to Youtube Playlist Converter (made most web-dev concepts click in my head)
    • AI Posture Detector (first project in Python and using ML)
    • Kanye Zone Bot (taught myself basic C++ and CV)

      A-tier:

  • Non-shallow conversation
    • ex: learning about someone, catching up with friends, brainstorming an idea, transferring knowledge, etc.
  • Sports with other people
    • ex: cycling with friends, playing ping-pong, etc.
  • Constructive hobbies (writing, art)
  • Learning something new

    B-tier:

  • Video games with friends
    • Slightly worse but still in B-tier: watching movies or shows with friends
  • Reading a good book (fiction or non-fiction). My favorites so far are:
    • The Expanse series (all 9 of them plus the short stories)
    • How to Win Friends and Influence People
  • Playing constructive video games
    • Ex: building in Minecraft, Kerbal Space Program, Besiege

      C-tier:

  • Consuming media alone (video games, anime, movies, comics)
    • To steelman this practice, I’d say that it gives you material to talk about with other people who consume the same media, and sometimes the media is good enough to appreciate as art or be thought-provoking.
  • Reading Hacker News

    D-tier:

  • Being a digital zombie (consuming content on Reddit, YouTube, Instagram, etc.)

Now, that being said, another point from our conversation that I thought was wise was “well, when you die you don’t get virtue points or something for how you spend your time”, so I think the right answer to the question “how do I spend my time” is somewhere in between optimizing for S-tier activities and doing whatever you want to in the moment.

Another idea I had that I like was that time isn’t fungible, which is to say that an hour of time when you’re tired is different from an hour when you’re motivated to work, which is different from an hour where you’re feeling like socializing. You can’t just “spend” your units of time on anything you want; there is only a subset of the total action space available at any time.

All that might be obvious wisdom but I liked using the word “fungible” there since I recently learned about it when NFTs got popular. It also means that I need to do a little introspection to see how I’m feeling and what activities are in the realm of possibility at the moment. For example, this holiday break I’ve been feeling burnt-out for programming and organizational work (code review, helping organize the triathlon club’s race in February), so I’ve been choosing other high-tier activities like hanging out with family/friends and writing, and of course some video games and mindless scrolling on the side.

Anyway, the point of this article is for me to practice crystallizing my thoughts and to throw some ideas out there on how to evaluate if you’re spending your time in a satisfactory way, as food for thought. As a fun exercise: what tier would you put reading this post in? I haven’t added comments to this blog but feel free to shoot me an email or Discord message.