Mar 19, 2022

Tracking Every Minute I Waste

By Mustafa Sultan • Issue #52 • View online

Friends,

Once you move out of your childhood home, on average, you’ve used up 93% of all of in-person time with your parents (The Tail End — Tim Urban). It’s a similar story with your siblings.

This made me think about how I use my time. Am I properly using it? Or am I sucker for inertia? Will I have regrets on my deathbed?

Time left with your parents (grey) once moved out

Value of Time

An interesting approach is to calculate a rough hourly rate for your free time. Then keep this in mind when choosing how to spend it.

This is an excerpt from the Naval Podcast — the most valuable bit of content I’ve consumed.

No one is going to value you more than you value you. Set a high personal hourly rate, and stick to it. When I was young, I decided I was worth a lot more than the market thought I was worth. And I started treating myself that way.

Factor your time into every decision. Say you value your time at $100 an hour. If you decide to spend an hour driving across town to get something, you’re effectively throwing away $100. Are you going to do that?

The Value of Time Calculator takes you through a series of thought experiments to calculate how much you value your time.

It calculated that I value my free time at £84/hour. Some interesting implications of this:

1️⃣ I shouldn’t work locum shifts (overtime) for under £80/hour.

2️⃣ Spending an hour to return something worth <£100 is a waste of time unless the Post Office is en route. Much better to just give it to someone.

3️⃣ Negotiating on price is probably a decent use of time. For example, spending 15 minutes to negotiate £500 off the price of your car would mean you are earning £2000/hour.

Wasting Time is Contextual

Despite my love for Naval — I’ve not found this framework particularly useful. Mainly because wasting time is contextual.

I think my 20 most productive hours in the week are probably worth more than £100/hour. Time spent on the important non-urgent tasks in the Eisenhower Matrix.

But the 20 least productive/lowest energy hours in my week, times I wouldn’t be doing anything useful anyway are worth less.

Tracking Wasted Time

I don’t think every second should (or can) be productive — but I am keen to cut out total wastes of time: YouTube rabbit holes, refreshing Twitter, most of my Instagram usage.

I think all of the above are not only a waste of time, but in broscience terms: They do something to the dopamine circuits in my brain which is detrimental to the rest of my day.

Learnings from Tracking Wasted Time

1️⃣ I waste less time than I thought.

2️⃣ It’s useful to have an activity to do in those 5/10 minute dead zones in the day. I like the Kindle app for this.

3️⃣ I waste a lot of time in bed on my phone in the morning. This is a bad start to the day.

4️⃣ I waste more time on days off than on work days.

5️⃣ Tracking wasted time doesn’t really account for busywork; time spent doing useless tasks which feel like work.

6️⃣ I feel good about watching a TV show if 1) It’s planned 2) I do it after getting my day’s work done 3) It’s high quality content. The worst thing is trying to find something to watch in the middle of the day. That’s a total waste of time.

What I'm Consuming

🧠 it’s beautiful, i just don’t always see it by Ava [article].

The biggest way I’ve surrendered is by letting go of my anxiety. And I had a lot of anxiety to let go of. Part of that was the overt always-worrying-about-worst-case scenarios part of it. But another part was the general tension that bled into everything. I’ve always been so tense. And the tension has been useful maybe 5% of the time. But it bled in the other 95%. It’s like looking down and realizing you’ve been white-knuckling what you assumed was a terrifying roller coaster ride when it was actually a gorgeous scenic drive. And now you’re like, wait lol, I didn’t even bother to look around.

🐵 Sicko Mode Inc. (Gorillaz x Travis Scott) [YouTube].

🌎 The Network State: How to Start a New Country by Balaji Srinivasan [Book Pre Order].

💊 20VC: Mark Cuban on Reshaping the Pharmaceuticals Industry [Podcast]. The US pharmaceutical industry is obviously a joke. I’m a big fan of people seeing a problem and just setting out to fix it on their own. Mark Cuban has launched costplusdrugs.com; selling drugs at cost + a small markup. Hopefully to pressure the rest of the industry to set sane pricing.

Podcast

I’m experimenting with putting video highlights of my podcast on YouTube. I don’t have any delusions of going viral, but I hope that the YouTube algorithm can help surface my podcast to the right niche who find it interesting.