A few afternoons ago, in an attempt to try not to work, I picked up Walden or Life in the Woods by Henry David Thoreau. It turned out to be a good choice, because Thoreau had something to say about wasting time. “The cost of a thing,” he wrote in Walden, “It is the quantity of what I will call life that, immediately or in the long run, must be given in exchange to obtain that very thing”.
The meaning of Thoreau’s words is not that we should all work without indulging in leisure: he was indeed, historically, one of the main critics of this type of life. In fact, he argued that we waste too much of our time on things we don’t value. Without thinking about it, we are committing a cosmic error in evaluating costs and benefits, if we measure them not on the basis of money but on the most important thing: time.
It is difficult to refute this reasoning. Many of the pastimes to which we devote huge portions of our lives give us pleasure in the moment, but then generate anxiety and sorrow when we can tear ourselves away from them. On average, in the first quarter of 2020, a U.S. citizen spent three hours and 43 minutes watching television every day, according to the Nielsen institute. That’s a lot of time, but still less than the three hours and 46 minutes people spend staring at their smartphones.
A precious resource
I’m not saying that non-work activities are necessarily a waste of time. On the contrary: there is a lot of evidence that time spent daydreaming or enjoying activities outside of work can lead not only to happiness, but also to better results and greater creativity. The reality is that time can only be “wasted” in two ways: when we dedicate ourselves to things that take away space for more fruitful or uplifting activities, and when we consciously devote ourselves to things that, on balance, we don’t even like. These situations can be a source of anxiety and regret, but in reality they are a valuable resource: by training ourselves not to waste our time, we will build a reserve of it to use in joyful and productive ways.
We all happen to waste time on useless things at the expense of more precious ones, and to kick us later. I once stayed up until three in the morning watching Howard and the fate of the world – critically recognized as one of the worst films in history – the night before an important job interview (further aggravating, I still remember the plot of the film).
I wasted that time because I didn’t calculate the opportunity cost of watching that movie well: that is, I didn’t weigh the value of all the other things I could have done as an alternative (sleep, for example). If humans were perfectly rational creatures, we would be able to calculate the costs and benefits of each activity well enough to avoid such mistakes, or at least not to repeat them over and over again. But most people know from first-hand experience that that’s not how things work. Even the experts are wrong: in an experiment involving professional economists, nearly 80 percent of them failed to correctly assess opportunity costs.
These errors occur because, in the absence of prior planning, the impulsive children in the brain who lack an idea of tomorrow dominate our executive functions. This leads us to overestimate the value of a small short-term pleasure and underestimate the value of our long-term well-being. The results can be minor things, like playing games Angry birds for another ten minutes, or more serious, like continuing to smoke for another day. Everyday.
On a leash
I realized how much I didn’t like it Howard and the fate of the world only when the movie is over. But, mysteriously, we humans waste a lot of time even doing things we already know we don’t want to do. Take the example of the smartphone: a convenient and practical tool. Yet despite its benefits, in a 2015 study nearly one in three owners found it more of a kind of “leash” than a source of “freedom.” And this leash has serious consequences: psychologists have established a link between the excessive use of smartphones and “digital addiction”, which in turn can lead to loneliness, anxiety and depression.
So why do millions of people decide to be put on a leash? Like any other addiction, the excessive use of smartphones attracts us by stimulating the brain’s reward system: we get an immediate, but very short-lasting, reward, which quickly vanishes and leaves us prey to sorrow and the desire for another dose. While it doesn’t increase the level of addiction, any compulsive waste of time that doesn’t make us happier in the long run – whether it’s solitaire games or kitten footage – can still damage our well-being.
For the sake of happiness and productivity, our goal shouldn’t be to take advantage of every possible second of escape and fun from our days. If anything, it should be managing our days in accordance with our priorities, distinguishing between the wastes of time we love and those we don’t love, and giving up the latter. Here are two ways to get started.
We plan our free time
The best way to deal with the opportunity cost problem is to decide how to manage time before starting any activity, that is, before our decision-making capacity can be distorted by the pursuit of short-term pleasure (especially if it is one in the morning. and the tv probably broadcasts Howard and the fate of the world). In his book “Deep work. Concentrate to the max. Four rules for regaining focus on really important activities, ”Cal Newport recommends a strategy called time blocking: make decisions in advance about the use of time, then respecting our schedule.
It doesn’t have to be limited to work. For many people working from home during the pandemic, work and private life began to intertwine in an annoying way because there is no obvious time frame imposed by a formal workplace. My answer is to set a schedule for everything, including hobbies, entertainment, and even daydreaming. For example, we could write “waste of time” on our agenda from 13.30 to 14 tomorrow. Since wasting time is no longer a hindrance to our schedules, it ends up not messing up our rhythm, and the chances of getting back to work at 2 pm increase greatly.
We give our bad habits a monetary value
In 2012, two management scholars from the University of Toronto carried out a series of experiments in which they asked participants to think about their income in terms of hourly wages, and to assign a monetary value to the time they spent on recreational activities. Participants, for example, had to think about (non-working) time on the internet in terms of lost salary. As a result of this thinking, the happiness people derived from their recreational activities had diminished.
Researchers have interpreted these findings as a negative consequence of monetizing leisure time, but this method can be of great value in deterring us from engaging in addictive pastimes that we don’t like. For example, spending a lot of time on social networks is an activity that – as research has shown – reduces our happiness in case of excess, especially among young people. If we suppose that we spend the average amount of time recorded in the United States on social networks (about 142 minutes a day) and earn an average hourly wage (again in the United States and equal to about $ 29.92), in the end we “spend” in this activity a time equivalent to $ 71 per day.
Let’s remember our hourly wages at the beginning of each day, and get used to remembering it when we start an activity that could take up some of our time. We will have more possibilities to make efficient decisions in using social networks, quickly informing us of what is happening to our friends and the world, without having to feed our brain’s rewards system through an expensive hour of repetitive navigation.
In Walden there is a particularly seductive passage, in which Thoreau compares time to a stream. “Time is but the stream where I go fishing,” he writes. “I’ll drink you; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and I see how shallow it is. Its subtle current flows away, but eternity remains ”. Fishing in the river of time – even without catching anything – is not a waste of time. It can be a special form of reverie.
The problem is whether we fish when we should hunt, or whether we are dedicated to flying fishing while preferring the one with the hook. And the same goes for any pastime: even reading Walden, I noticed. It’s a delightful book, full of interesting insights. But at some point you need to shut it down and get back to work.
(Translation by Federico Ferrone)
.