I loved Marcus's example about how he was successful with Puzzle Storm:
> I had been studying chess for a long time, and discovered a new mode on Lichess, puzzle storm. It’s a timed mode where you solve as many puzzles as you can in about 3 minutes. It was fun and lined up with a skill I was learning, so it ended up winning in whatever calculus my subconscious does to decide how I’ll spend my free time. This was a nice fluke, but there’s no chance that coding on a side project, for example, will ever win out in in an immediate gratification battle with the time-wasters. So I don’t see how it could be the path to a general solution.
I think in general, the key to "wasting" time effectively is to find high-reward time wasters and make them as convenient as possible.
For me, this has meant selectively blocking websites so that you aren't fully out of options, but so that you read long-form magazine articles instead of Reddit. For others, it could mean having an interesting series of Youtube videos on how to engineer spaceships or on how to apply a new technology you've been curious about.
In times when we have foresight or hindsight, we can bank that and take concrete steps to nudge ourselves towards better choices.
> I had been studying chess for a long time, and discovered a new mode on Lichess, puzzle storm. It’s a timed mode where you solve as many puzzles as you can in about 3 minutes. It was fun and lined up with a skill I was learning, so it ended up winning in whatever calculus my subconscious does to decide how I’ll spend my free time. This was a nice fluke, but there’s no chance that coding on a side project, for example, will ever win out in in an immediate gratification battle with the time-wasters. So I don’t see how it could be the path to a general solution.
I think in general, the key to "wasting" time effectively is to find high-reward time wasters and make them as convenient as possible.
For me, this has meant selectively blocking websites so that you aren't fully out of options, but so that you read long-form magazine articles instead of Reddit. For others, it could mean having an interesting series of Youtube videos on how to engineer spaceships or on how to apply a new technology you've been curious about.
In times when we have foresight or hindsight, we can bank that and take concrete steps to nudge ourselves towards better choices.