Tag: waste

What you mean when you say you’re wasting your time doing X

What does it mean when you say you’re wasting your time doing X?

This question came to me recently when I was sitting on my porch. I thought: why am I wasting my time here? And then I had the follow on thought: what should I be doing this is not a waste of time?

Before I moved though, I asked myself: why was sitting on the porch a waste of time? I concluded I was sitting on the porch because it was a nice summer day and I was enjoying it. In other word,  enjoying a nice summer day has no value (i.e. it’s a waste of time).

Now there are other enjoyable I do that I don’t consider a waste of time: talking with loved ones, eating a good meal, going for a walk. So why is this different?

I think I have been conditioned to think simply sitting around is a waste of time, best done on vacation. Otherwise I think deep down I should be doing something productive. it’s a weirdly puritanical view that conflicts with my non puritanical views on food.

So the next time you are doing something you enjoy doing, attach some value to that. 

 

Waste is a failure of imagination, and other thoughts on waste

Waste is a failure of imagination. Woodworkers know that especially. Good wood workers will try and minimize waste by designing their cuts to use as much of their raw material as possible, and then they will try and use up the remains in one way or another.

We should be like good woodworkers, using our imaginations, our minds, to come up with new uses for things we consider waste. During the pandemic we even depended on our wastewater to tell us how we were doing. Even that kind of waste can be useful.

Not all waste is material. Waste can also be temporal: we talk about wasting our time and wasting our life. Here too, we should consider ways to minimize such waste. And not just by being busy all the time. Being idle is not always a waste of time: idleness can be often be necessary. Just as being busy without a purpose can be a great waste of time.

What is important is the context. How we spend our time — idle, busy, something else — and whether or not it is a waste depends on the context we have of it. So, doing nothing with someone you love is a good use of your time, just like working hard on a project no one wants could be a waste of time.

These are some of the recent thoughts I had on waste when I read this post: No such thing as waste, by Austin Kleon. I recommend it.

I’ve written often about waste here on smart people I know. Recently I talked about it, here, when I was futzing around with code. Then there is this piece, on how Waste = failure to innovate. More on time and waste: Focus on maximizing your time instead of worrying about the time you waste. I even wrote on love and waste: On the love we waste.

If that isn’t enough, here’s all the time I touched on waste on this blog. Quite a lot. None of it was a waste, though.