One major time sink is to do destructive activities to oneself and then have to spend a lot of time undoing or repairing the consequences of these actions. Sometimes, our work gets thwarted by events outside of our control; for instance, one might set out clothes to dry in the yard and then the neighbor accidentally sprays those clothes with a hose. Other undoing of work happens through mistakes on our part—e.g. accidentally deleting some document that took hours to work on. The topic of this post is mostly about "I'll eat a whole tray of tater tots and then run miles and miles later to undo the effects of overeating".

While the logic of the tater tot example given above is pretty easy to follow, we often undermine ourselves in more subtle ways. In this post, I'll explore some ways in which I've undermined myself and clarify some strategies I'm using to try to correct course.

Clarify what you're doing

I've mentioned in other places how I used the dvorak keyboard layout for some time. Designed to be better than the default QWERTY arrangement of keys, the dvorak layout allows for more comfortable typing. That is what proponents of the dvorak layout, at least, will tell you.

Assuming that the dvoark keyboard has some advantages for comfort of typing and over the long run it can help produce repetitive strain injury (RSI) for people who type a lot, let us evaluate whether or not in makes sense to use this keyboard layout or another.

The first matter to examine is typing itself—as a tool, as a technique, as a skill. When and where do we type? For what purposes do we type?

A person might switch to dvorak for more effective typing, but another question to ask is should I be spending so much time typing?

I think for most people, the answer to this question is no. I say this as someone who types relatively a lot; you are reading my blog, for instance. Even if I give myself an ample amount of allowed typing for a day (e.g. I can send 10 emails, chat online for 1 hour, and write 2 blog posts), I still think that my relative typing volume is not so high that I need to further optimize my typing.

Now, if somehow I convinced myself that it was a good idea to type paragraph upon paragraph of verbose prose on Reddit to prove how smart I am to the Internet, maybe I would be typing more. But is this a good use of your time to begin with?

Premature Optimization

We can do lots of self-defeating, time-wasting behaviors through premature optimization. That is, trying to "improve" some aspect of how we live our lives (e.g. through "life hacks") without adequate introspection into what exactly it is that we are doing and why the speed or efficiency of that thing should be optimized in the first place.

Another topic I've been discussing much in the Interwebs category of this blog is search engines. Search engines optimize for something—giving you a quick big tech approved suggestion in response to a string of a characters. But to Google everything in a city isn't the best way to get to know a city and the people who live there. You are know more familiar than any tourist who pops through that city if you just ask Google for everything.

So an optimization like "using Google to make choices XYZ" may give you a faster decision, but it will eliminate important activities—exploring a city, finding out things for yourself, speaking with people—from your "workflow".

The Internet may appear to be a convenient way to make things faster and easier, but by choosing this option you can be self-defeating by only knowing how to use Google and failing to grasp the uniqueness of the place you are in.

Take control of your attention

Rarely in the West do we talk about knowing too much. Since we begin schooling, we're told how more reading is better and the image of a "cosmopolitan person" is someone who reads glossy magazines about all sorts of world affairs.

While being aware is important—as is being sober and remembering useful information—there is great danger in being endlessly distracted and bombarded with unimportant choices.

The cost of knowing

I don't use coupons very often, but I know many people are very keen to chase after deals and promotions. For someone with an already fixed plan about what they are going to eat, what they will need, etc., coupons can be a useful way to cut costs.

However, for the "food tourist", coupons can become a driving force in one's life, sucking away time and attention for what—saving a couple of dollars on a burger combo?

Similar things can be said for activities like trading stocks. Someone who does some investing or trades on a relatively fixed schedule can benifit from this activity. The person who constantly checks Robinhood on their phone suffers greatly from watching the ebb and flow of stock prices.

For a while, I made myself scattered brain by studying too many languages. Without a plan for "boxing in" what times were appropriate for which languages, I wasted a lot of time and attention with questions like, "should I review Japanese now or look at some Spanish verbs?" For the single-minded, focused individual this isn't a problem. Similarly, for the person that knows how to outsource work this isn't an issue; we can develop ourselves in many ways, and no one individual can know all the languages—obviously. So the sensible, normal person chooses their battles. Better to do pushups than learn Hindi grammar.

Some of us are nerds who are slowly learning to do better...

Toolbound

To know how to do certain things, you need to have certain objects or infrastructure around you. While a guitarist might know some general things about music, a guitarist is much more expressive with a guitar, which functions as a kind of extension of the body.

It seems that there is a lot of strong dependency by design in many places—including the corporate world. Many company employees cannot do most of the things they do at work away from the infrastructure of their corporations—they use complex software, navigate complex bureaucracies, make and receive payments through many mechanisms, and so on and so forth.

One way in which we can be very self-defeating is to get overly involved in some one tool or thing which we do not have good reason to believe will continue to be around. Of course, for every job, you must learn some specifics of what you are doing—here I am more concerned with investing excessive amounts of time in a particular configuration.

For instance, you might have a very elbaorate set-up of custom hotkeys in a video game. First, you should ask why you are playing games to begin with (not to say this is bad, but it should be kept in check). Second, you should have reasonable expectations about whether or not the developer of your game will break your keybindings with patches, updates, and so forth.

There are many frustrated Apple users who constnatly are fighting off breaking changes to MacOS. Probably the same for Windows. I have pretty much given up on making custom keys to do things more efficiently on computers.

Remain vigilant

Frivolousness, idle talk, and negligence are the proximate causes of much pain and suffering. We must be on the guard against self-defeating behavior by purposely aligning ourselves and working diligently.