Some Tips For Saving Time
Jan. 5, 2021
A non-exhaustive list of ideas for saving time:
- Delete your social media, and perhaps any other website or app that demands that you consume it rather than create with it.
- Another way to think of it: all these sites and apps transform your time in to one thing or another, what are the most valuable products of that time? In general, Facebook products are designed to transform your time into greater awareness of companies who would like you or your friends to buy their products. (Or neo-nazis, depending on whether the day ends in a Y.)
- Possible exclusions are apps or websites for reading, you have to make the calculation of whether you get more out than you are putting in. Reading books in general are better value than websites or apps, but some online media can also be a net gain.
- You could also try scheduling times for using apps, particularly if need them to communicate (e.g. catching up with people on WhatsApp) or if they are a good source of ideas (e.g. Twitter is quite good for finding interesting new ways of doing things in R).
- Note that scheduling is a great way of dealing with procrastination. You can warm your brain up and wind it down at certain points of the day by scheduling your interactions with various apps, websites, and people. Try paying attention to what you do in a given day and shaping that into a schedule.
- Procrastination is best managed rather than avoided, so it’s better to schedule it. Be honest with yourself, do you need to procrastinate before you do things (like a run up to a jump?) or would you be better saying to yourself “I have to get X done today, but I need to leave 10 minutes to catch up on xkcd later on”?
- Sometimes changing your sources to something more curated is useful. I’ve recently signed up to the London Review of Books. Sure, it’s a bit fusty and old-fashioned but it’s well written and expands on a wide variety of topics.
- Get a bike (this is on my to do list!). A bike increases the distances you can travel in a short space of time, and can reduce the time it takes to do short distance chores like shopping. It has the added benefit of being better for the planet than a car and better for your body than walking or doing nothing.
- Borrow code from other people to get started on programming tasks. I usually Google how to do a thing, once I have mapped out a rough spine of what I need to. (I find this mapping out step acts as a filter for the solutions provided to you, a sort of intuition for what the solution should be) The same is true when you’re learning to do anything: be an apprentice, find someone who is good at a thing and learn from them. This is actually easy for anyone to do, and easier than you might first think.
- **Learn to communicate more effectively. **This is one that I feel I need to work on. I often feel that I am going backwards and forwards between people, whether it is trying to understand what other people want or communicating to others what it is that I want.
- One tip that gets bandied about is to record yourself speaking to people. It can be very cringy, but the trick is to be a critical friend to yourself while listening back. Just because you know it’s you, that’s no reason to judge harshly - just focus on what’s being said and how, and work from there.
- I also know that I need to ask more questions. It feels weird to say that because I regard myself as being on a personal quest to find out all of the stuff. The problem is that I’m also keen on sounding like I already know all the stuff. Can you tell this from my blog posts at all?!? Sometimes it can feel like asking a whole bunch of questions undermines that world view. I now consciously try to ask more questions in support of my quest.
- Also a memo to myself for later: IT DOESN’T HURT TO EDIT YOUR WRITING FROM TIME TO TIME.
- Learn orthogonal skills. By which I mean, if you are a scientist try to find complementary subjects in the humanities and the arts. I’ve said “orthogonal” here to sound clever and to indicate that the connection to your chosen vocation isn’t going to be obvious, but really I just mean that it’s different and you might eventually apply it.
- How does it save you time if you spend time looking for connections? Well, if you find your connection, you have extra tools to use. If you fail, you may discover something else in the process.
- Learn keyboard shortcuts.
- By way of a corollary, the more keyboard shortcuts you learn for an app the more you will do with an app, and the more you will use it. If there’s no shortcut for something that you do regularly, make one. If you don’t like a provided shortcut, or it doesn’t make sense to you, change it.
- Second corollary. Keyboard shortcuts are a great way to learn how to memorise things. It’s low stakes but incremental, if you learn N shortcuts, you can learn N+1.
- Write stuff down. And perhaps just as importantly have a strategy for coming back to things later. The commandment that thou shalt forego thy social networks at the top of this list is really a double headed command to use intentionality and self-control in order to sanitise your information inputs, and this is a friendly reminder that the time saved can be used to revisit and reinforce those inputs.
- Get enough sleep. I am so bad at this. I have been meaning to read “Why We Sleep” for over a year but I am too scared to learn what my terrible sleeping habits are doing to me. That said, I do tend to do better when I am following some of these other tips - especially the ones about acting with intentionality and self-control.
- Again, this is another spend time (on sleeping) to save time (sluggishly prodding work tasks while waiting for the coffee or tea to kick in) later.
- This could probably do with its own post of do as I say not as I do advice.
- I’m loathe to say what the right amount of sleep is. You know when you’ve had enough. And it varies, which makes it hard to plan around. It always feels like I need two hours after the alarm clock!
- I don’t think framing sleep around quotes like “studies show most people need 4/6/8/14 hours a night” is helpful, as in my experience the more I fret the worse I do and the feeling of divergence from nature tends to increase my fretfulness.
- Related: Get enough exercise - I am working on this.
- Get a second/third/Nth monitor. I have recently done this and the jury’s still out for me. If I’m honest I just use the biggest monitor available. I’ve still included it on the list because most people won’t buy a smaller monitor than the one they have. I find that seeing more means doing more and concentrating better. When I grow up I hope to have more interesting anecdotes about how I used a multiple monitor setup, but I’m still pretty green.