Wasting time!

Hi!

Sometime I try to estimate which is the  proportion between wasted and productively used time, the goal is to measure if I spent too much time on leisure and too less working.

I do believe that most of you already had compute the proper ratio, but what to consider in order to make a proper estimation? Let’s see (intra week days calculation)

1. Working: On everage, we stay at work for 8 hours, I assume  most of the time performing our daily tasks from which one should remove 30/40 minutes for the launch, and another 30/40 minutes for coffee breaks, walks around the building to breath some fresh air &c. But, our daily tasks may not necessarily require 7/6 hours of continuous work, it happen that I use some of my worktime to pursuit other goals, like reading articles, coding algorithms or learning stuff. More frequently at work one may have meetings, where most of the time most of the people are useless or partecipate only for few minutes and then are wasted. I try avoid meetings where I’m not stricly needed, limiting the amount of time wasted.. In short, that 8 hours at work in my case are pretty well used! Let’s put the ratio at 80/480. (wasted/not-vasted)
2. Commuting! Can’t do very much here,I go to work by car and need to be concentrated on my driving and what is happening on the road, so no much space for thinking or doing other productive stuff. But, I leave near my office for the very reason of minimizing the time wasted in the car, and on average I spent 30 minutes a day driving. So: 90/510.
3. Sport: This is not wasted time, one need to be healty! Mens sana in corpore sano! I’m at the gym 3 times a week for 2 hours plus commuting time, so let’s say 1 hours a day on average, summing up: 90/570.
4. Cooking,cleaning &c! This is crap, it’s very time consuming, again on average I spent about 60/80 minutes for all the dishes (out of work) including cooking and cleaning! So: 170/650.

At this point, I counted 650 minutes (~11 hours) and about 170 wasted minutes (~2 hours). Normally I wake up at 6:30AM and I’m at work at 7:30AM, I’m back at home on average at 17:00PM taking into account the average fitness time, commuting time &c.

So technically, one have plenty of time for working on personal projects, reading books, writing my blog &c, so going ahead we have:

1. Reading books is never a waste of time, it helps to maintain the mind sharp, to learn a lot of stuff and grow on the experience of other people –authors &c-, in general is a positive experience in any way, specially today when everything is fast and furious and people are not able to concentrate more than the 3 seconds needed to like a picture on facebook. So, I will consider the average of one hour a day reading a positive experience: 170/710.
2. Studying, programming &c: Everyday I take some time for learning new stuff and coding, this is clearly not wasted time and is a pleasant afterwork activity. About 90 min are devoted to this activity, so we have: 170/800.

For now I counted something like 13 and half hours, as far as I’m able to tell at this point is something between 20:00PM and 21:00PM. What I do at this point assuming that I’ve nothing very interesting to code, is watch Youtube, write my blog, or if I’m tired then I read a book.. But I may safely assume that most of this time is wasted: 260/890.

So this gave me 890 minutes or about 15 hours, the missing time is all spent on dressing, personal igiene, time at the grocery store &c, all wasted time: 380/1010. Or almost 17 hours, the rest of the time I sleep..

So seems that my wasted time ratio is something like 380/1010=0.376. Dont know if is good or bad, but what I do know is that this value is very dependent on how good you spent your time at work, is crucial to not waste that 8 hours, short breaks, no youtube, no bullshit talk with people &c.

Hmm, is writing this blog a waste of time?? Good question.