A first-stage filter to assess someone is to see how they value their time.
A lot of people feel guilty about wasting their time. They seem to think they always have to be doing something productive.
It’s not necessarily a bad thing to feel this way.
It’s becoming increasingly common, but it’s still not the norm. For many people, time hangs heavy on their hands, and they welcome any distraction that helps in killing it.
That’s why this is a pretty decent first-stage filter in assessing someone.
A person who thinks this way is likely to be more conscious and aware of themselves than someone who’s never thought about how their life is passing by.
You can also get more done if you’re one of those who feel guilty about wasting time than you would if you were a chronically lazy, unmotivated person.
Feeling “guilty” on wasting time at least shows two things.
One, that you value your time, and two, that you have some ambition to use your time to achieve some goal, howsoever hazy and ill-defined.
That’s why feeling guilty about how you spend your time is a good first filter – it separates some from the rest. I’ve seen it usually indicates intelligence more than the median.
But it’s only a first filter because it doesn’t go far enough.
If life was a video game, and an average person was still on level 1, someone who thought like this would have probably cleared level 1, but might not have reached level 3.
The Efficiency Fallacy
Feeling guilty of time passing by you means you’re thinking about efficiency.
This is usually a misplaced optimization.
The feeling of guilt arises because you’re trying to optimize efficiency.
You can take efficiency as the percentage of time utilized : (time used “productively”) / total time.
Attempting to optimize efficiency means you focus on maximizing the use of every second.
The problem with trying to optimize every second is that you’re trading down.
It’s penny-wise but pound foolish.
A short term optimization isn’t usually a long term optimization. For a mathematical function, a local maximum isn’t necessarily a global maximum.
Trading down means you’re optimizing the way you spend your pennies at the cost of your pounds.
There are two problems.
The first is that optimizing for pennies doesn’t always mean optimizing for pounds.
Trading down means the seconds are spent well but the stress means you lose hours, days, weeks, months or years.
It’s not always true that the most efficient use of your day lies on the same trajectory as the most efficient use of your week or year or life.
The stress is the pressure of a machine trying always to optimize.
Because you optimize seconds and not days or weeks, you give up things that help in the long term but carry short term costs, for things that help in the short term but carry long term costs.
Sleep is the easiest example that comes to mind, but I think in general it means that the urgent takes precedence over the important.
This is the outcome of a very narrow tunnel vision.
You can’t ever see beyond the day-to-day, what’s right in front of you.
You either ignore the larger picture, or assume there’s nothing wrong and if you just handle the seconds everything else will take care of itself – after all, what is a day but 86,400 seconds and a year just 365.25 times of that?
It’s like a company faced with two projects – one costing $10 million and giving $13 million in a year with a 30% profit, and another costing $100 million and giving a much smaller profit of 5%.
Assessing them independently of the outside world, you’d go for the first one, but that only works in theoretical examples.
There’s a chance the second project leads to new projects in future – but if you only assessed it based on the next year’s results, which most employees do because that’s how their performance is judged, you’ll miss out.
You trade down when you focus on efficiency instead of effectiveness.
Effectiveness beats Efficiency
It’s a tired old cliche, but I’ll repeat it anyway.
Efficiency is doing the thing rightly.
Effectiveness is doing the right thing.
A light bulb might be super efficient with near zero resistance.
But if it doesn’t even work, what’s the point of it? I’d go for the one that works every time, even if it’s highly inefficient.
The first step is to understand that you don’t want to optimize for efficiency, you want to optimize effectiveness.
Efficiency is pointless without effectiveness – like being the fastest runner but running in the wrong direction.
It doesn’t really matter how many seconds or hours you used; it only matters what you do in them.
The quantity of time itself is irrelevant; two good hours can be worth more than twenty average ones.
I think understanding the fact that time isn’t proportional to results is the first step to losing the stress of not utilizing each moment optimally.
The second step is to understand that you optimize effectiveness by giving up some efficiency.
The optimum level of efficiency is that level beyond which any increase in efficiency comes at a cost of effectiveness.
It’s the old inverted U curve you see everywhere, which for some reason is thought to be very informative. It’s very common – too little of most things is usually bad, and too much of most things is also usually bad.
So if your tax rates are too low, you get no revenues, and if your tax rates are too high, you also get no revenue, because no one will work when you take everything away from them as tax. The optimum is somewhere in between.
Ditto for efficiency and effectiveness. Too little efficiency means you don’t do anything at all – you can’t be effective. Too much efficiency and you risk self-destruction in the long term, which again destroys effectiveness.
I’ve drawn it like this because I’d guess the optimum efficiency for most of us is somewhere to the right of 50%, rather than at 50% – meaning it’s not a symmetrical graph.
Let’s go with 70% for this example – it’s just indicative, everyone has to find their own optimum.
Therefore, if you understand and agree with this, you’ll actually cut down on your efficiency anytime it creeps up above 70%, because you know it’s going to hamper your effectiveness.
This is trading up.
This is the second step. Understanding that trying to optimize every second is actually detrimental for you and reduces your efficiency – therefore accepting some inefficiency is in your interest.
You intentionally give up using some of your seconds optimally so that your hours will yield more, and you intentionally give up hours for days, and even days or weeks or months.
To trade up, you sacrifice seconds for hours and hours for days, you sacrifice days for weeks and weeks for months and months for years. And you can sacrifice years and decades for your life.
It’s OK to waste hours talking to friends or reading books or watching movies. Even if you learnt absolutely nothing, just the recharge you get is enough.
That recharge means you utilize the coming hours and days better.
Again, to appreciate this you have to stop measuring inputs and measure outcomes.
It doesn’t matter how many hours you study or draw or code, it matters what you learn or produce.
Working 10 hours while tired could be far worse than 2 hours when you’re rejuvenated.
You just have to know how to trade up – when to “waste” your seconds and hours and days.
The simple answer is – as far as possible, do it on your own terms. Pick a time when you see your performance flagging – when you’re constantly distracted by the internet or phone, or falling asleep, or just not in the mood.
You can call it sacrifice or wasting or whatever – but whatever it is, it should rejuvenate you. And you won’t feel guilty about the waste because there isn’t much else you would have done with that time.
A lot of things worth doing aren’t easy ; they take all the motivation and mental or physical effort you possess.
You need to be near your peak to draw or code or exercise well; you can always get by unconsciously on a bad day but you know it isn’t up to par.
That’s one reason to eat clean and sleep well – it affects performance. You’ll waste much more time if you feel like crap all the time.
So when you’re tired or just not in the mood – why not do something else? “Waste” that time without feeling guilty about it, because you’ll come back better the next day.
Shun Self-Importance
It also helps not to take yourself, or anything really, too seriously.
If I waste a couple of hours – it’s not the end of the world.
If I didn’t waste them, nothing would be really different.
A lot of people who’ve done something great spend a lot of time doing things that might be considered a waste. Mark Zuckerberg’s schedule impresses me because he gives so much time to other stuff than work.
I’m not that important that my time is so precious every second needs to be monitored. and doing something that isn’t “work” would be a calamity.
It’s a balance between not devaluing yourself to such a low that you splurge your whole life away because “nothing matters” and between taking yourself so seriously that “every second matters”.
But if you got this far in this essay, you probably don’t have the problem of devaluing your time – it’s the other extreme that’s the issue and so you need to over-compensate if you want to get rid of this habit.
Why overcompensate? Because of that graph above – you might be compromising your effectiveness because of your efficiency.
Metrics aren’t Goals
And more importantly, because if it’s making you unhappy, then it’s a pretty stupid thing to do.
Efficiency, effectiveness and any other metric are just metrics – the point is that they should make your life better. If they don’t, then why use them?
One of the most common mistakes we make is to mistake a metric for a goal.
GDP growth rate is a metric.
It tells you how the final value of goods and services produced in your country has grown with over a given time period, that’s all.
The goal is different – it could be economic prosperity or equality or anything else.
It shouldn’t become your goal – because it doesn’t perfectly align with the real goal.
A 1% growth from industries or agriculture could benefit more people than the same from services.
Or GDP might be growing fast, but the gains could come from the top 10% only.
But setting a goal like 5% GDP growth rate is pointless – who cares if GDP grows at 5% or 10% if it doesn’t help in achieving the real goal?
It’s just the same for any metric like efficiency or effectiveness. What’s the point of a highly efficient or effective life if you hate every moment of it?
That’s why I said feeling guilty of time passing by is only a first-stage filter for assessing someone.
A second-stage filter would be someone who understands that a metric like efficiency or effectiveness is meant to be your servant, not your master.
Which means it should never deduct value from your life – and therefore you should not feel bad about it.
You should worry about it if it’s a symptom of a larger problem – but also recognize that it’s not the real problem per se.
If you’re doing well and you’re happy it doesn’t matter if you waste 90% of your time sleeping. But if you’re not doing well or you’re not happy with how things are, then it’s unlikely you’ll be thrilled by the knowledge that you’ve used every second efficiently.
This also makes it hard to distinguish someone who clears the second stage filter from a random person – because both don’t obsess about every second and constantly feel guilty about using it well.
It’s good to appreciate there’s no reason to be efficient or effective unless you want to.
If you want to, it’s your choice, and you don’t need to feel guilty about it – because it’s voluntary, not a compulsion.
Diversify
One way to try and keep both efficiency and effectiveness high is to have many things going on.
That way, when one thing exhausts you, moving on to the next can recharge you.
So in between working on something else, you can always write essays like this one or learn investing or play an instrument or build a following or whatever.
It’s like having your cake and eating it too.
You can aim for both efficiency and effectiveness in your life, just not in the same thing.
If you spent your entire day sprinting or drawing or coding you’d see performance fall after the first few hours; if you hopped between different things you could do better and probably enjoy it more too.
What this meant to me when I understood it was that I could function better if I have more things to do, rather than putting all my eggs in one basket.
It’s obviously person-specific – many great athletes and performers dedicate their lives to their craft. But you should know if you’re one of them before aping them.
When you’re tired or bored of one thing after a few hours, you can jump on to the next – it could be reading, writing, singing, playing games, investing and so on.
Recognize when productivity falls in one thing and move on. You’ll do better and won’t feel bad about wasting your time. And you’ll never have an excuse that you’re bored or you have nothing to do.
You just have to order things – bundle high and low effort tasks. Something that’s less taxing should follow something more taxing.
And still sometimes you won’t feel like doing anything and that’s OK – everyone needs to recharge sometime.
Summary
This essay isn’t as clear as I’d want it to be.
It might be because I haven’t understood this as well as I’d like to, or perhaps this is just a complicated subject.
It’s easy to find contradictions here.
Value your time, but don’t take yourself seriously and fret over it.
Efficiency isn’t what you want to optimize, and wasting time might actually help you, but efficiency still has a correlation with effectiveness up to a point.
Effectiveness matters more than efficiency, but there’s no reason to worry about it if you don’t want to, and if you do decide to, you shouldn’t let it take over your life.
You can focus better if you pick one thing and perhaps end up doing great in it (although that’s a gamble that might not pay off). Whereas, you can have both efficiency and effectiveness if you choose multiple things, but there could be slightly less chance of excelling (that’s debatable). The usual trade-offs with portfolio diversification.
I like to think the contradictions exist because this all of these ideas are a continuum and you just pick a point on it that suits you – based on what you value.
This essentially boils down to:
Optimize effectiveness over efficiency if you want to optimize anything.
Effectiveness means a focus on outputs rather than inputs – on results over time.
Quality of your time usually beats quantity – a few good hours are worth more than many average ones.
Short-term optimizations aren’t always long-term optimizations; penny wise is sometimes pound foolish.
Too much efficiency can compromise effectiveness.
Don’t take yourself too seriously; you’re not that important that a lost hour is a calamity for the universe.
Having more things to do will keep you from squandering time.
A metric is a servant, not a master – it shouldn’t take over your life.