
Time is the only real currency we have - hackeryogi
https://blog.theboringtech.io/2020/04/16/time_is_the_real_currency.html
======
acituan
I hate this framing. It is pressuring, dehumanizing as it contextualizes human
endeavor in transactional terms, usually in a market.

I know this goes against the ethos of high-tech, but humans don't have an
imperative to be as _productive_ as possible. They don't have to make the
_most_ use of their time. They don't have to get as _efficient_ as they could.
These are metrics that work fine for our machines, our code. But humans are
not machines. Sure, we shepherd the machines, and sure sometimes we are in
rivalrous dynamics that increasing efficiency has a payoff, but it is never
the goal in itself.

The real "currency" we have, if we are using the term in the sense of denoting
essentialness, is our humanness, our mortality, our psyches, our connection
with other people and seemingly mundane but meaningful parts of our lives. I
mean, look how many of us started baking their breads and _enjoying_ it. It is
not a wise use of the "currency of time", but it is part of life very well
spent, as our internal reward mechanisms have been telling us.

~~~
Barrin92
Yep. This attitude of being your own little manager of your own life and
treating it like an incremental game is horrible.

In James P. Carse's _Finite and Infinite Games_ there one chapter on how the
use of machines works both ways. It doesn't only shape the machine but it
makes the person more 'machine-like'. In an attempt to operate a machine the
person has itself to act mechanical and to comply with the interface of the
machine rather than the other way around.

It's I think very evident in the way we communicate today or how everything
becomes 'gamified' or even how dating works. Success today has to be defined
in formal or quantifiable terms not because anyone actually consciously chose
to do it, but because it's the only way you can put it in a computer, which
actually was supposed to exist to empower people. It's pretty sad honestly.

~~~
WalterBright
> In an attempt to operate a machine the person has itself to act mechanical
> and to comply with the interface of the machine rather than the other way
> around.

I remember an article a while back where archaeologists examined the bones of
pre-Columbian women in America. The bones showed the signs of long term
debilitating, repetitive work from kneeling and grinding, by hand, corn into
flour.

Just last night I watched an American Experience episode on the guy who
revolutionized wheat farming. He spent his youth on a farm, harvesting corn by
hand, estimating that he'd harvested 1 million ears per season by himself. He
was amazed at how wonderful it was to get a machine that mechanized corn
harvesting.

I'd much rather mow my lawn with a mower than a pair of scissors.

In the 1960s, my dad was writing a book. My mom would type up the drafts for
him. Every new draft meant my mom would spend hours banging it out on the
typewriter. Think how much easier that is today with our "dehumanizing"
computers. Can you imagine today typing the whole thing over again because you
made a misteak?

Machines have largely free'd us from dehumanizing labor, not caused it.

~~~
Barrin92
>I'd much rather mow my lawn with a mower than a pair of scissors.

I think you didn't go far enough with the implications of Carse's statement.
It's not just that a machine mows your lawn quicker, it's _that you have a
homogenous lawn in the first place because it is a thing that can mechanically
mowed_.

For example, why instead of a lawn do more people not have a wild garden, with
uneven terrain? Why did everyone feel compelled to put a green square, empty
plot of land in front of their houses? is there anything interesting or alive
in it, or does it exist because it can be mechanically operated? Given that
mowing the lawn is something 'you want to get over with', is it not more
accurate to say the lawnmower needs you shoving it around in a system that
efficiently maximises lawn-mower production?

To understand the implication of what Carse is saying is to understand that
machines don't just enter your environment, they shape your entire perception
in a way that makes it conducive to be further operated by machines.

Is living in estranged suburbs with lawns really positive for human
flourishing, or is it in a sense the logic of the car and the lawnmower
operating on people rather than the other way around?

Is all the corn really part of a diverse diet and ecosystem, or have we
adopted the diet because it is the thing that can be mass-produced?

~~~
WalterBright
We went to agriculture because otherwise we'd starve. Mechanized agriculture
has virtually eliminated starvation. I don't want to live like medieval people
did. If you think their lives were better because of no machines, I frankly
cannot understand that.

My lawn is mostly wild, I just mow it once a month or so to keep it from being
an impenetrable tangle of blackberry pushes about 8 feet high. Cutting those
bushes by hand is an exhausting process. I finally got a weed whacker and
replaced the string on it with a blade, which knocks them down to a size where
the mower can finish them off.

Much as I dislike gardening, I dislike being buried in blackberry bushes even
more. I also keep the brush down around the house because it's a fire hazard,
and it gives cover for mice to get in the house, and provides avenues for
insects to get in the house.

Grass also does a good job of keeping the erosion of the hill I'm on down -
blackberries don't. Keeping the grass from going to seed reduces my problems
with being allergic to grass pollen.

So yes, there are reasons other than impressing the neighbors.

If I ever do sell the joint, however, I'll have to have it properly
landscaped, as I'm sure that'll increase the value of the property far more
than it would cost.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Nitpick section:

> _We went to agriculture because otherwise we 'd starve. (...) If you think
> their lives were better because of no machines, I frankly cannot understand
> that._

It's not like that. We were _forced to_ start doing agriculture by competitive
pressure; the people who did could conquer the people who didn't. Agriculture
essentially gave us everything we consider achievements and civilization, so
I'm glad that it happened, but there is a point made by some historians that
the transition from hunter-gathering to agriculture marked a significant
quality-of-life _decrease_ for individuals, and we've only rebounded from that
in the last few centuries.

> _Mechanized agriculture has virtually eliminated starvation._

+/\- supply chains. As we're about to see with COVID-19, just because we can
sow and reap efficiently, doesn't mean people won't starve.

\--

Anyway, GP's point here isn't that cutting bushes by hand is somehow better -
but that the reason most people worry about those bushes, or have a lawn in
the first place, is technology. The point may not apply to houses on the
countryside, which have to fight off the wilderness for practical reasons. But
there's a curious co-dependency between lawnmowers and suburbs. The reason you
need a lawnmower is to maintain your lawn. The reason you need to maintain
your lawn as a flat sheet of grass is because your HOA wants to make the area
look nice (to some standard of aesthetics). The reason they want that is
because they can. The reason they _can_ demand that is because cheap and
available lawnmowers exist.

If I'm to believe Wikipedia[0], lawnmowers were created to help maintain
sports grounds and large gardens. It seems reasonable to call the homogenized
looks of modern suburbs to be in big part a side effect of that invention.

\--

[0] -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawn_mower#History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawn_mower#History)

~~~
WalterBright
Hunter-gatherers regularly starve, because food resources are inconsistent.
When you get too old to follow the herd with the tribe, you get left behind to
die. You get a crippling injury, you get left behind to die. Hunting and
killing game is always a high risk activity for injury and death.

Starvation greatly limited the number of humans.

Me, I like consistent, varied, cheap food. I like living in a heated dwelling
in winter. I like cotton undies. I like being dry in the rain. I like having
teeth that last. I like having corrective lenses. I like disco music. I like
my office. I like playing with my hot rod. I like knowing that the doc can
likely patch me up if I get injured. I don't want to deal with horses. I like
glass windows.

All this complaining about modern technology "dehumanizing" people makes me
laugh. It's like complaining about a door ding in your Ferrari.

~~~
jodrellblank
It's no surprise that you like what you have; people like whatever it is that
they have, whether they originally wanted it or not:
[https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_the_surprising_science...](https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_the_surprising_science_of_happiness)

~~~
ImaCake
Tell that to anyone who is poor in an economic depression. Or anyone who has a
serious illness. I once spent three months bedridden from an autoimmune
illness. I never once "liked" what I had.

~~~
jodrellblank
And yet "wartime spirit" is a thing. "We were poor but happy" is a cliche'd
phrase for a reason. I'm not going to tell you that you enjoyed your serious
illness, but it's not a claim that everyone feels happy all the time (clearly
false) or that people wouldn't always change things if they could, it's about
what studies repeatedly find from people's self-reported happiness.

That we vastly over estimate how happy success will make us, and how miserable
illness and failure will make us. That 6 months after winning the lottery or
becoming paraplegic people self-report being equally happy with their lives
compared to before. That people become happier when stuck with a thing they
can't change, than they do with a thing they feel they can change. That we
don't know this about ourselves makes us make choices that make us less happy
overall. And that these are surprising results is the reason the talk is worth
watching.

~~~
ImaCake
I think this is important nuance that I did not address in my comment above
this one. It is very true that the problem space of choosing things to
maximise happiness is filled with unknowns and hazards.

Thanks, I take no offence and I understand your intention here. It is
important to understand that suffering and happiness are not mutually
exclusive, and for some people the intersection might be larger for where
happiness intersects with suffering than for happiness or suffering by
themselves.

------
keiferski
I’ve often wondered what society would look like if optimized for saving
people time. Just some quick thoughts:

\- Crosswalks and traffic lights would become non-existent and replaced with
more pedestrian overpasses, turning/merging lanes, and other designs. Waiting
for the light to change is a huge waste of time for both pedestrians and
drivers. It seems like we might get this eventually with self-driving cars.

\- Minimization of waiting rooms. If your appointment will be delayed, you’ll
be informed of it ahead of time via SMS. Time slots are strictly enforced to
avoid overlap.

\- Purchase and checkout items while you shop, rather than waiting in line at
a cash register. Or just skip shopping in person and order everything via
delivery.

\- Adoption of remote work and minimization of unnecessary commutes. Plus
faster public transit in general. Japan is pretty good with this (the
Shinkansen is impressive.)

~~~
fnord77
> replaced with more pedestrian overpasses,

vegas has pedestrian overpasses and they are a tremendous waste of time - much
worse than crosswalks. A better approach would be to keep the pedestrians at
grade-level and have car under-passes

~~~
nouveaux
If you're talking about overpasses in general, I can see how car underpasses
are more time efficient. I assume pedestrian over/under passes are cheaper to
build.

Regarding Vegas, it doesnt seem like crosswalks are more efficient, especially
from the perspective of the driver. 1) Large intersections with crosswalks
tends to have people linger in the middle of the street. This delays the flow
of traffic. 2) Right turns are much slower. 3) People who jaywalk. This can be
easily observed in Vegas at major hotels. Cars are always struggling to turn
into the hotel with large crowds of people trying to cross regardless of the
color of the light.

That said, I agree with another poster that crosswalks are optimized to force
you into hotels/shops and are subpar.

~~~
bobthepanda
The problem here is actually twofold;

\- Crosswalks don't do well in overly large intersections

\- Vegas over-concentrates traffic into large arterials that require large
intersections in the first place.

A traditional American street grid, while requiring more stopping time, in
general allows traffic to diffuse across many different routes, making large
intersections with two ten lane roads unnecessary.

------
lisper
I agree with the sentiment of this article, but strongly disagree with the
title, and the advice to learn to type fast.

The title is abuse (or misunderstanding) of the word "currency". Currency is
an accounting mechanism. Time is, well, something else. It's an incredibly
valuable commodity, a necessary (but not sufficient) ingredient for any
activity and hence any kind of progress, and one which you cannot make more of
and so is worth using wisely. But comparing it to _currency_ is a category
error.

Which brings me to my second point: it seems intuitively obvious that if you
want to use time wisely you should use it efficiently, and typing faster is
more efficient than typing slower. But this overlooks a crucial point: typing
faster can only produce a linear improvement in your efficiency. If you type
twice as fast, you will be able to type twice as many characters in the same
amount of time. But there is another dynamic in play: if you type slowly, then
the cost of typing will become more painfully evident to you, and that can
motivate you to think about ways to type less, and that can lead to
_exponential_ improvements in typing efficiency.

I have been coding for forty-one years. I never learned proper touch-typing,
and so my typing has always been quite slow by coder standards. As a result,
typing boilerplate is extremely painful for me, and I try to avoid it at all
costs. That drove me to learn Lisp, and that has led me to a coding style
where I only need a tiny fraction of the code that, say, a Java programmer
needs to do the same job. So yes, I type 2x slower, but I only have to type
0.1x the amount of code for a net win of 5x. And the techniques that lead me
to that win can be applied recursively. There are domains in which I can get
100x or 1000x improvements (i.e. 1 line of Lisp code is the equivalent of 1000
lines of Java or C). I never would have been motivated to learn those
techniques if I were able to type fast.

~~~
bbbobbb
> There are domains in which I can get 100x or 1000x improvements (i.e. 1 line
> of Lisp code is the equivalent of 1000 lines of Java or C)

That's quite an extraordinary claim. Would you mind sharing some examples of
that?

~~~
lisper
It's very hard to give short examples because for any short example you can
find another language that does the same thing with similar effort. For
example, this:

[https://edicl.github.io/cl-who/](https://edicl.github.io/cl-who/)

is basically PHP embedded in Common Lisp. So any example I give you to show
how cool CL-WHO is you could render it in PHP and conclude that PHP is
similarly cool.

The Big Win only happens if you want to combine a feature that is best served
by language X with some other feature that is best served by language Y. In
the non-Lisp world, you now have to start gluing together code from entirely
different ecosystems, whereas in Common Lisp everything lives together in the
CL ecosystem (including nowadays the ability to call C code). So I can combine
CL-WHO seamlessly with other programs written in CL (and C). _That_ turns out
to be a huge win in the long run.

It pretty much comes down to Greenspun's tenth rule [1]. Macros and the
ability to embed DSLs are a huge win in certain domains. Two which I have
personally worked in are autonomous spacecraft control and chip design. You
can do things in Lisp that you could not even conceive of doing in C short of,
as Greenspun's tenth observes, basically re-inventing Lisp.

\---

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_tenth_rule](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_tenth_rule)

~~~
kazinator
No, it's actually very hard to give _large_ examples. You're not going to
replace a million lines of C with a 1000 lines of Lisp, unless something crazy
is going on, like most of that million lines is completely the wrong code for
the requirements at hand. Or it solves a huge problem X, which includes small
subproblem Y; and in the Lisp program we only care about Y.

Small examples are easy: for instance, some one-liner in Lisp based on
hashing, compared to a five-liner in C, plus 1000 lines of infrastructure:
hash implementation, dynamic strings, ...

Big C programs that have the Greenspunned architecture don't need a lot of
additional lines to add new functionality.

~~~
lisper
> You're not going to replace a million lines of C with a 1000 lines of Lisp

Maybe not, but it's quite plausible to replace a million lines of VHDL with
1000 lines of a DSL embedded in Lisp.

But 1000x win is unusual. Usually it's closer to 10x. But that's still a
bigger win than you're going to get by learning to type faster.

------
seventytwo
Parameters of the universe are currency. Time is one of them, space (or area
on earth’s surface) is another, and energy is a third. How these three things
are used is what generates _value_ to human beings. Each of the fundamental
items can be traded individually, but money is used as a proxy for _value_.
The most common trade is when a person can trade their time and their body’s
energy. They produce some level of value using those two inputs, and receive
money (a proxy for that value) in exchange. A person who can generate more
value with the same amount of time and energy should be receiving more money
than someone who generates less value, as money is only a proxy for value.

People can also secure space. We’re used to thinking in terms of real estate,
which always prices in the value of a structure or natural resources or
potential on top of the raw spatial resource. But the raw three dimensional
space can be traded as well, just like time or energy, as it is finite for
humans.

Money is just a tangible abstraction later on top of these fundamental
parameters of the universe we trade. Providing lots of energy in a small space
in a short period of time is incredibly valuable to humans, and so money
reflects that. Using energy and time and space in a more efficient way to
produce something in a factory is valuable, so money reflects that.

It’s not that money isn’t real currency, it’s just an abstraction layer for
tradable natural commodities like time, and energy, and space.

~~~
kator
The only currency you're born with is time. The rest are acquired by the
application of time.

~~~
IggleSniggle
Really though? During that time, you occupy a space, and the spaces afforded
you by the society you are born into define the constraints within which you
can apply your time. That is, all of your "currency you are born with" is
really "futures".

Even the time on Earth you are allotted at birth is constrained by the
environment you are born into.

~~~
loco5niner
You also consume space to gain energy.

------
mark_l_watson
Interesting premise and article.

I do disagree with a lot of it since I believe more in maximizing human
potential through mindfulness and tuning ourselves instead of our tools.

re: “ You don’t want to be the person who thinks their problem through on a
piece of paper,...” For difficult problems I think you do want to be this kind
of person. Walking away from your laptop, sitting outside or anywhere relaxing
with a pad of paper and a pen, and really thinking is a super power.

The author’s good advice on spending a few minutes a day learning about your
IDE/tools can also be applied to the idea of sitting quietly a few times a day
with paper and pen and just thinking. If you don’t have this habit, how about
trying it for just ten minutes a day to see if it pays off for your work
style?

~~~
cloudier
This sounds like a good idea, and I’m planning to try it out. Thanks for
sharing!

I find that a lot of the time when I’m figuring out how to solve a problem, I
need to read a lot of code. Is that something you do before you sit down with
pen and paper?

~~~
mark_l_watson
I used to have the habit of printing out other people's code to read, and read
it like I would a book. I stopped doing that a long time ago, but I used to
get real value from doing that. I still like to read other people's code, but
I am more likely to do it by browsing github on my iPad.

------
lucb1e
The movie "in time" (2011) kind of explores this. At the time, I wrote:

> it gets you thinking. What prevents time from being used as currency? Or are
> we really doing the same by paying people an hourly rate instead of based on
> their accomplishments? Not to mention how many lives that million years
> capsule must have cost.

~~~
Andrew_nenakhov
This explores it in a rather poor way. Once you and all your friends have a
hundred year on your accounts, why not just stop working in this society and
just go build a new civilization using bottle caps as means of exchange? Why
being slaves to people who fix prices for everything all the time?

Also. Economy there had no sense. Every person is passively using 24h worth of
'money' every day by simply existing. That means, to make ends meet they must
earn 24h + some surpus to make a living, but the dude earned something like 5
hours in a shift (he had ~23:55 before shift, and 1:04:50 after. If shift
lasted 8 hours, he was making just 13 hours per day - totally unsustainable.

The idea was nice, but I feel it was a somewhat wasted potential.

~~~
lucb1e
Yes sure, it's a mainstream movie and meant as entertainment rather than
educatively. But for being a mainstream movie, I liked that it made me think
about this.

~~~
ClumsyPilot
Titanic was a mainstream movie, but the attention to detail is on another
level entirely. They just didnt develop the concept enough and think though
the consequences. There is a great plot in there somewhere

------
fersho311
I have a hard time empathizing with people’s desire for saving time or being
efficient. I feel like all I have is time and I don’t mind helping others out
when they need help, filling out useless forms, or waiting in line. Everything
sort of have its own beauty. I’m not sure how I got here, but to me time just
feels infinite.

~~~
amakine
I really would love to believe that this mindset is possible, but I run into
the following problem:

If time really seems infinite to you, and you see the beauty in every "overly
time-consuming" procedure, you must draw the line somewhere.

If you wait in line, and every minute, the next in line is served, and you are
standing in 5th place, you might think "ok, we've got to wait..give or take
5mins"

Now imagine that every 50 seconds, someone cuts into the line ahead of you,
with some plausible excuse (health-related, or "in a rush" or whatever else
you'd accept).

How many people do you allow to push you back before you decide to no longer
allow people to cut ahead of you? I think that's where you draw the value of
your time.

~~~
bittercynic
Not the one you asked, but I have a similar attitude, and some sense of trust
and fairness is necessary to maintain this attitude.

If I'm in urgent care for a relatively non-serious problem, and people who
much more urgently need care keep getting served ahead of me, that just seems
like the right way to do things, and I'll be happy to wait my turn, or
eventually give up and go home.

On the other hand, in line to pay for purchases I would not like for someone
to cut in front of me. It's rude, and there is an established norm that they
would be selfishly breaking.

------
zelly
This article is a real failure in the rule of Profile Before Optimizing.
Changing your editor or whatever is a micro-optimization. Among professions
where typing is involved, programmers type the least number of keystrokes.
Secretaries and data entry clerks type much more and often much faster than
programmers. Also, a lot of typing is not even characters into the editor but
keyboard shortcuts.

The real time killers are mental--fatigue, boredom, procrastination, anxiety,
and so on. How many hours do you spend a week on HN or social media? How long
are you going to take to do that big refactor you've been putting off? How
long do you spend in useless meetings or chats you're not persuasive enough to
get out of? At what point is RTFMing too long procrastination? How long do you
spend watching N*tflix at home if you really want to get that side project
done?

The bottleneck is never your typing speed or your editor commands. That is
snake oil by script kiddies trying to sell you something.

~~~
TeMPOraL
That's a great and underappreciated point. I'm really fond of my endless
tinkering in Emacs, to optimize and automate away all kinds of repetition and
tedium. But when I do a honest accounting I realize that, even though my
newest tweak that took 30 minutes to make will probably save me a hundred
hours in the long run, I'll blow more than a hundred hours over the next month
procrastinating on HN because of anxiety about starting tasks. Like I'm doing
_right now_ \- I was supposed to take an hour off for some personal "me and my
thoughts time" an hour ago. But HN is just more immediately gratifying.

It's true for me and I guess for many (most?) programmers: the limiting factor
is inadequate capacity to control my own emotional state.

~~~
zelly
> I'm really fond of my endless tinkering in Emacs, to optimize and automate
> away all kinds of repetition and tedium

Me too, my .emacs.d directory has thousands of commits. It's fun. All
procrastination is fun. It feels mischievous and therefore exhilarating.

------
seanwilson
When comparing careers, I'm amazed how little people mention free time. You
see people saying things like "I did blah to move from $X thousand a year to
$Y thousand a year" but it's rare anyone mentions how much free time they have
like "I earn $X thousand a year and have Y days off".

I understand more money now could mean you'll have more free time later, but
earning a lot with no time for your own personal growth doesn't sound great to
me. I'd rather take a pay cut for substantially more time off.

~~~
mark_l_watson
Over a forty year career, I only worked full time for perhaps 30% of that
time. Sure, I left a lot of money on the table but my wife and I are still
financially secure and working 25 to 32 hours a week on average gave me more
time with friends and family, and time to write (which I enjoy doing).

Spend effort on career and job skill development, but treat jobs as
transactions of time for money, and I suggest devaluing the value of money
once basic needs and saving for future needs are met.

~~~
seanwilson
> Over a forty year career, I only worked full time for perhaps 30% of that
> time. Sure, I left a lot of money on the table but my wife and I are still
> financially secure and working 25 to 32 hours a week on average gave me more
> time with friends and family, and time to write (which I enjoy doing).

Exactly, that sounds amazing! I'd love to hear more people talk this way when
they mention their earnings.

------
moosey
If you want to stop wasting your time, and want to learn something thoroughly
and once, I would recommend learning how to use Anki effectively. It has
reduced the amount of time it takes to learn new things, while simultaneously
allowing me to remember them for far longer periods of time. I can currently
stop an online course for months, and return to the same point when I come
back, with far more knowledge of the subject than I had when I left.

Anki, like using a calendar and communication tools effectively, is just
pushing the burden of organization, memory and attention out of your head, and
into your environment. This will not only save you time, but it will also, if
set up right, give you that sense of peace of knowing that whatever you are
doing is exactly where you should be.

It's solid. I learned about it in "Learning How to Learn", but the mental
concept stuff is from "The Organized Mind".

~~~
hackeryogi
Thank you for this - and the references to how you came across the concept. I
was personally only recently introduced to anki [1] & [2]

However, I tried it out but I couldn't end up using it to 'remember books' or
broader concepts that the books convey indirectly. I've started summarising
books and using a manual form of spaced repetition to remember them better.

Do you have any advice on organising such knowledge better?

[1] [https://ncase.me/remember/](https://ncase.me/remember/) [2]
[https://superorganizers.substack.com/p/how-to-build-a-
learni...](https://superorganizers.substack.com/p/how-to-build-a-learning-
machine)

~~~
moosey
I just take handwritten notes, then convert them into carefully designed and
tagged cards in Anki. Even if I forget something, searching my Anki deck will
usually not just tell me the information, but what book it came from, and
often which page. I'm pretty diligent about careful note collation. I've
definitely gotten better since I read "The Organized Mind", a book which was
so enlightening for my persona that I built more than 1000 cards to remember
as many of its concepts as I could.

Regardless, I'm reading my previous comment and should admit that I'm quite
intense about efficiency in learning. Less so about money. I've spent a lot of
time tutoring, making this an important subject to me and I get.... emotional.
I apologize if my original comment seems rude. It certainly feels that way to
me.

~~~
misiti3780
I have the same system going, and i started it right after reading The
Organized Mind also. What a great book! - that never really gets hyped up.

------
ciconia
Somehow the idea that time is our only currency is conflated with efficiency.
Yes, time is the most limited resources we have, and therefore the most
precious, but does this mean we have to squeeze every last bit of productivity
from our time? Do we really have to keep running all the time, always
optimising for more efficiency?

I would say the exact opposite. If time is our most precious asset, let's
rather spend it on what's really important: family, friends, community,
environment, happiness, harmony. Let's pass our time doing things we love just
the pleasure of doing it, rather than chasing after money, success of
whatever. Let's live in the moment, for the moment.

~~~
keiferski
I don’t think these are separate things at all. Being efficient with your work
time is great because it lets you spend more time with family, friends, and so
on.

Long commutes are really the killer here: it’s super difficult to cook a
family dinner if you get off work at 6:00, spend 30-60 minutes commuting home,
30 minutes buying groceries, another 30 minutes cooking, etc. Working from
home and then cooking dinner with delivered groceries gives you an extra hour+
with your family.

~~~
tluyben2
> Long commutes are really the killer here

They are, but you are on HN so it's safe to assume you have other options, so
why do you commute?

~~~
keiferski
I meant in general, for society. Personally I have a 10 minute bike commute to
a private office because I prefer to have a little bit of space between work
and home.

~~~
tluyben2
I think many people have that issue; they cannot actually stay at home doing
what they want. It is a restricting factor actually creating the commuting
issue you mention. Many people _need_ to go to the office. I think it would be
better to educate the kids to not have that mental hangup. Personally I never
had that feeling (and never worked in an office for 25+ years; I am at my
kitchen table and so is my wife); I was expecting to hear either of a) I have
no other choice, because job/money b) I need space between work & home. Over
the years I had business partners trying the same thing and getting divorced
(like now with the virus; people simply cannot sit at home or endure their
spouse and kids); maybe it wasn't too solid to begin with?

~~~
keiferski
> people simply cannot sit at home or endure their spouse and kids); maybe it
> wasn't too solid to begin with?

Eh, I think this is a symptom of what I’ll call “Modern Excess Syndrome”: the
idea that if unlimited amounts of something aren’t beneficial, then the thing
itself is broken. I.e., _if ‘more = better’ isn’t true for X, then X is
undesirable or broken._ It just illustrates the lack of nuance we have in
contemporary western society.

You see this play out in lots of ways. Helicopter parenting is a good example:
the prevailing assumption is that a good parent is one who spends as much time
and resources as humanly possibly with their kids. Yet as a consequence the
children have worse outcomes, are less independent, etc. And people are less
likely to become parents as they perceive parenthood as an end to their own
life as individuals.

The truth is: it is in the nature of some things to be focused, or sporadic,
or limited in some way. Chocolate cake is a delicious treat, but eating it for
every meal is both unhealthy and destroys much of its uniqueness.

~~~
tluyben2
That could indeed be the case. I have, however, another explanation; most
people just do stuff without thinking, planning or any forethought whatsoever
just because 'it is normal'. You get married, you have kids, you buy a house,
you get a job, you go to an office 9-5, you mingle with your colleagues (and
you _like it_!) etc and everything else is weird or not for them. When
confronted with major change, like this virus and as a result, working from
home (getting laid off, health issues etc), they are forced from the path and
realise that they do not like it. I 'zoom' with friends in my home country who
have kids because 'it is something you do'; they love them when they see them
1-2 hours/day, but now they hate (big word, probably not true, but that's what
they use, and not jokingly; they are getting burnt out) them, quite openly.
They didn't think it through and that works because normally the kids are in
school, sportclub, piano lessons, sleeping etc so you don't have to think too
much.

A big issue is that people are not taught and don't teach their kids to enjoy
things without outside stimulants. If I have a computer that works (it can be,
and actually I prefer, one from the 70s or 80s) and a manual, I can be alone
for years. Now with internet it is even easier. But I was taught by my parents
to enjoy myself with minimal 'stuff'; books, pen & paper and just my own
thoughts. Many people seem to lack that resulting in decisions that are unwise
and don't work long term.

------
noiv
Check out the work of Carlo Rovelli and start considering time as a human
construct. It is not needed to explain the world and physics around us. Isn't
framing time as a currency while proposing it as part of the universe just an
attempt of fraud? It feels like getting offered shiny glass beads while taking
things of real value.

~~~
subhobroto
> It feels like getting offered shiny glass beads while taking things of real
> value

It indeed is if you consider majority of work is not time sensetive even if
the person explicitly telling you so, absolutely convinces you that's the
case.

This becomes clearer when you move on from an employee to a business owner and
the only person you answer to is your customer.

Unless there's a literal environmental disaster, like when my community went
up in flames during the California fires - everything else can wait.

Even during the flames burning, houses that were almost on fire were in a
waiting line behind houses on fire.

The only reason why "it was due yesterday" works is because the employee
believes their value is worth less than what the employer values them at.

------
mapcars
>My Language is the best (Or, your language sucks)

>No, it is not. Both Church and Turing proved that.

This is not true, a simple check - are you writing in assembler/C? Why not?
They are the fastest languages and both are perfectly complete from Church and
Turing standpoint. But of course, there are thousands of other criteria that
make the difference.

~~~
ukj
Theoretical vs practical expressivity.

You can always insist you were arguing for theoretical expressivity when
people start throwing counter-examples at you.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expressive_power_(computer_sci...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expressive_power_\(computer_science\))
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_tarpit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_tarpit)

------
choeger
> Figure how/where your application code runs.

Most important advise to become a useful software engineer. I did not want to
believe how many developers just did not give a damn about what exactly makes
their code execute and when that happens.

------
cryptica
Unfortunately, in essentially all big corporations, the incentives encourage
developers to waste as much time as possible - Mostly by focusing their
attention on creating elaborate and ever-changing development processes and
constantly adding unnecessary software complexity at the same time. This
doesn't work well at all when you also allow individuals to detach themselves
from any responsibility over the code that they produce.

The culture of wasting time is so pervasive that the vast majority of
developers who practice it don't even realize that they're doing it -
Ironically, they're often the same people who write long articles about how to
be productive and who brag about how organized and full their schedule is and
how they're using all the latest productivity tools and how high their test
coverage % is and how good their workflow and CI pipeline is... I call BS on
all this.

People who spend most of their time explicitly thinking about processes are
bureaucrats. Truly productive people don't need to think about processes, they
evolve naturally through sweat and tears; good processes are the byproduct
(emphasis on the word 'byproduct') of a focused mindset of desperately wanting
to achieve specific goals, not the mindset of ticking-off boxes from a static
checklist where you don't even understand the underlying purpose of the work.

You cannot be productive without a clear sense of purpose and goals.
Unfortunately most software jobs today lack purpose - In this case it makes no
sense to even talk about productivity. How can you know how productive (how
fast you're moving towards your goal) you are if you don't even know what the
end goal is. Finishing something is not a goal, it's a task. A goal is about a
deeper purpose.

Also if your goal is to help your company earn more money, this is only a
worthy goal if you have a way to check your personal progress towards that
goal. Usually this is not possible to do in a big company because there are
too many people working towards different goals within the same company
(sometimes even conflicting goals); the reality is that your work probably
doesn't matter so there is no such thing as productivity in a corporate
environment because it's not possible to measure the impact of your work in
relation to achieving a real company goal... However, if your goal is to
maximize your personal ranking or salary within the company, this is a goal
against which it is easy to measure progress; that's why personal goals trump
company goals every time.

KPIs are a ridiculous, completely futile attempt to fix this problem.

~~~
andrey_utkin
This. I've been thinking about this for last few sleepless nights. I am at a
start-up which has grown to 61 person. The tight connection of everybody's
everyday contributions to company survival has declined. A rigourous
accountability and incentives framework is still missing and there's no time
and resources to build it now. Most of employees don't know what is more or
less important and by how exactly much.

I found interesting the concept of Internal Market. This book appears to be
describing exactly what I got in my mind: "Internal Markets: Bringing the
Power of Free Enterprise Inside Your Organization ".

~~~
cryptica
True. Having worked at many startups as well as big corporations, I definitely
think that the environment inside big companies feels more like some twisted
form of socialism than capitalism. The idea of internal markets sounds good.
Having small teams which have a strong sense of ownership over different
projects is a good strategy in my experience as a developer.

------
r32a_
This is why a fixed currency makes sense.

You work and convert your time into currency which can be traded for other
goods or services.

When currency is manipulated, it allows the manipulator to make your currency
worth more or less. effectively theft.

------
Rerarom
I've often wondered what the world would look like if languages were actually
theoretically different not just practically.

I.e. what if you actually needed Fortran to write a program designed for
scientific computation, or Prolog for GOFAI etc. Maybe some cases would fit
into several languages ("I showed that SimCity is a special kind of database
so you can write it in SQL") but you would have proven gaps in capabilities.

Language disputes would be way more fun.

P.S. After you finished thinking about this, think about what model theory
would look like if Lindström's theorems were false.

------
DavidVoid
If you _really_ want to take the "Learn to type fast" advice to heart you can
get a Georgi keyboard [1] and spend a few months learning stenography [2].
That can get you typing at above 200 WPM! (but it does require a significant
amount of time to learn)

[1]
[https://www.gboards.ca/product/georgi](https://www.gboards.ca/product/georgi)

[2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wpv-Qb-
dB6g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wpv-Qb-dB6g)

~~~
progx
For a book author this seems a good thing, but for a developer?

We use so many special chars, i cant imagine that it is faster.

~~~
DavidVoid
You can make custom chords for special chars and type them just as quickly as
any other "word".

Here's an example of someone writing some javascript code with a steno
keyboard:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBBiri3CD6w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBBiri3CD6w)

I don't use it myself but I assume that it would be faster than regular QWERTY
typing, but only once you've used it for several years.

------
jccalhoun
This is only true in the Western industrialized world. Monochronic time
orientation is not the only orientation.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronemics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronemics)

Time is only money if you think of it that way. If your typing speed is
holding you back from things then sure learn to type faster. But I don't type
nonstop for hours at a time. A sentence here or there and then reflection.

------
Aperocky
The only real currency should be energy.

Joules. MJs for sake of unit sanity.

Energies are cheap where they're produced, but you have to spend extra MJs to
send them to where you need it.

Having a few thousands MJs in Pluto bank will make you rich there. But it
requires millions of Earth MJ to send energy to Pluto. The exchange rate of
course fluctuates with space infrastructure and flattens out when better
technology of sending and storing energy becomes available.

------
jiofih
Isn’t it ironic that in the “young dev” section he tells stories of how he
“set them straight” on their design choices, and then the next section is
about the naivety of “your way is wrong”...

The conversation on queues especially; I can absolutely side with the new dev
there. Queues have guarantees, database writes have guarantees, you just pick
the ones you care about, not decide based on irrational fear of losing data.

------
hartator
Money is technically just a proxy of other people time when you think about
it.

------
celeritascelery
> TurboCharge your Dev Environment

This section feels like a stub where the author forgot to finish it. Was
really hoping for some good ideas.

~~~
hackeryogi
Thanks for the feedback. It does have a short write up on things to do. I have
a lot more opinions on that, but was trying to balance out the overall length
of the post. Will try having one out just on the dev environment :)

~~~
celeritascelery
Looking at it again I didn’t realize the following sections were actually part
of that header because the headers were the same size and style. I thought it
was only that one paragraph about Jedi. That was my fault.

------
PeterStuer
That is what I have been saying to my friends for a long time. It is one of
the most important things to learn. You can get back anything but time.

So be very conscious about who you go give your time. No-one is 'offering you
a job'. They are 'buying a piece of your lifetime'.

------
carapace
This is great!

In re: time is money, it's even _worse_ than that: _attention_ is money.

The _quality_ of time varies with the "self-remembrance" if you will.

\- - - -

Take time to "pop the 'why?' stack. In practice many of us are "yak shaving"
and wasting a lot of time and effort on "low-leverage" actions.

> yak shaving

> [MIT AI Lab, after 2000: orig. probably from a Ren & Stimpy episode.] Any
> seemingly pointless activity which is actually necessary to solve a problem
> which solves a problem which, several levels of recursion later, solves the
> real problem you're working on.

~[http://catb.org/jargon/html/Y/yak-
shaving.html](http://catb.org/jargon/html/Y/yak-shaving.html)

\- - - -

The most metal programmers I know type hella fast. One guy in our office, we
would play hangman and the only way to beat him was to figure out the word
before he did, because the millisecond his brain "got it" you would hear a
small explosion as he typed the word on his clicky keyboard in a single
motion. If you figured out the word at the same time as he did he won. SOB
could also write bug-free C++ by the page. _At speed._

Another guy I knew had a tiling WM and only used terminals. A vim man, he
could type slightly faster then the system could respond, emitting a single
stream of characters that flowed smoothly from vim to wm to shell and back
again, his locus of attention flying around too fast to follow even if you
knew what he was doing (editing and recompiling or whatever.)

\- - - -

(Ooooo... Major points off for deep linking to XKCD without attribution. Bad
pool. It's probably one of the most important and useful XKCD comicS. "Here’s
an old comic..." ah, that's cold blooded.)

Other than that, this is the best general advice for programmers that I've
seen for a while. Yay!

~~~
hackeryogi
Does xkcd even need attribution? I was sure most readers would recognise the
art (if not the comic) :)

Point taken and corrected (noob blogger mistakes!)

Thanks!

~~~
carapace
You're a scholar and a gentleman! Well met!

("Does xkcd even need attribution?" Sir?
[https://xkcd.com/1053/](https://xkcd.com/1053/) would you forego the delight
of being the one who introduced somebody to XKCD? (^_^) <3 )

~~~
hackeryogi
You, sir, seem to have a xkcd catalogued in your head much better than I do.

Thank you sensei ! Well met indeed :)

------
abiogenesis
> If you write code for long enough, you will come across code that would want
> you to become the proverbial psychopath and shoot the original author.

I do come across such code all the time, and most of the time it's my own
code.

------
dathinab
> Learn to type Fast

Nah, IMHO the crux is not to type and still get stuff done.

If you have to type tones of overhead it's what hurts.

And with this I don't mean long method names (you have auto completion for
that). But thinks like not using derives in Rust ;=) or not using annotations
in Java.

Also for many of the more well established languages there are ways to
"connect a remote server to your IDE" so that you _never_ _ever_ need to
manually ssh into a server and change thinks there with some text only based
tool (besides the fact that there are a lot of server setups where you ain't
be able to do that anyway).

------
HeavyStorm
Time would be a currency if had inherent value, and furthermore, if that value
was normalized for all people.

Time has value, but the value isn't inherent to it, it how you use the time.
And that value is relative to the individual, can't be traded between peers,
sold or bought.

Time is probably a concept as far from currency as I could ever imagine.

(I once read that Focus is more valuable than time, btw. It's also not a
currency, but it has much more value)

------
jpswade
I really didn’t think this got to the heart of what makes time being the only
real currency such a great insight.

The rest of the article goes on to deliver, frankly an opinionated way for
young developers to act to maximise on their time.

I really think this is short sighted and honestly all of that can be boiled
down to having the ability to scale yourself effectively.

It’s basically about Kaizen, continuous improvement, but perhaps ironically
that takes time.

------
zipwitch
It seems appropriate to mention _The Quantum Thief_ by Hannu Rajaniemi, a
whirlwind sf novel where a large part of the story involves a city where the
currency literally is Time. (When a person runs out of Time, they are
transformed into a Quiet, mutely doing the necessary work to keep the city
running, until they have earned enough Time to be restored to themselves.)

------
kaonwarb
Reminds me of a quote from Brigham Young: "“Time is all the capital stock
there is on the earth. … If properly used, it brings that which will add to
your comfort, convenience, and satisfaction.” [1] I think of that occasionally
when wasting my time in "free" distractions.

[1] (Brigham Young, Discourses of Brigham Young, sel. John A. Widtsoe [1954],
214).

------
lcall
I wrote here about direction in life. Simple tech; I hope it is
skimmable/browseable:
[http://lukecall.net/e-9223372036854588981.html](http://lukecall.net/e-9223372036854588981.html)
.

I think direction matters more than speed. Even without a belief in God, but I
explain why I do.

------
mauritzio
What if we would give every person a fix amount of money every week during
lifetime. Where money older then a year becomes worthless? No inherithing, no
accumulation, no positive interest.

Because every person is worth the same and all we do, is spending our lifetime
doing stuff keeping us busy.

~~~
MattGaiser
> Where money older then a year becomes worthless? No inherithing, no
> accumulation, no positive interest.

Rampant inflation as every dollar is shoveled into assets.

~~~
mauritzio
Don't think so then there is no real inflation: the total assets equals
automatically the amount of money month after month after month..

Better then the never ending growing amount of inflation paper we have
noadays.

------
pgt
Ah, but what are you doing with the time you have? Is what you’re doing saving
other people time?

~~~
hackeryogi
Hopefully - that's what we're working on :)

------
smitty1e
And yet it "keeps onslipping, slipping, slipping into the future".

This implies that tomorrow is a bank.

------
borismus
Here I was expecting deep truths: spend time with those you love, don’t
squander your time on meaningless drivel that neither enhances the mind nor
expands the heart. But all I got were software engineering life hacks!

------
kazagistar
Currency exists purely as a construct of human minds. It depends on exclusive
ownership and individuals, both of which are mental fabrications, and far more
flexible then we make them out to be.

Article has great advice though.

------
DrNuke
Yeah, that’s why I can’t really understand fellows not willing to pay a tenner
or two for any service, content or product that will make them spare hours and
even days of their uniquely precious time!

------
naringas
it seems to me, that this has to do with a fundamental difference between
selling products and selling services (I don't mean not software services)

when you are making products (material widgets of any kind) it is possible to
achieve marginal costs with parallel and serial manufacture, and with
technology and specialized machines.

but if you're selling service (e.g. a waiter) then it's not really possible to
"industrialize" production the same way

and don't get me started on software (becuase I wouldn't know how to start)

------
julienreszka
What about attention, attention is the real currency

~~~
toomuchtodo
Attention is time. They are interchangeable for the discussion.

~~~
carapace
Not at all. All moments are not created equal.

If you're stressed out, hungry, got the low-blood sugar, tired, distracted,
etc. your attention is much less valuable (to you) than if you're relaxed,
well-fed and -rested, focused, etc.

One of the greatest forms of "leverage" we have in the world is the capability
of developing and focusing the quality of our attention, "concentration" or
"one-point mind". That's why meditation is worthwhile (one of the reasons
anyway) because, paradoxically, sitting and doing "nothing" for an hour makes
the other 10~12 hours way more productive, due to the improvement in
Q-of-A[ttention].

------
the-dude
TL;DR anyone? Time is money after all.

~~~
carlosf
\- be efficient at doing stuff

\- automate stuff

\- avoid time sinks

\- be pragmatic about technology choices

This isn't article isn't about currency, btw.

~~~
the-dude
Sure it is.

------
grdeken
Clearly you have not heard of memes, the only currency that matters.

------
koolhead17
Stoics[1] said the same many thousand years back.

* On shortness of life by Seneca

------
dfischer
What if Karma is real and that’s the only currency we need?

------
narrator
One thing Marx got wrong was saying labor is the universal unit of COST and
not of value. That cost does not always equal value is something that
communism doesn't understand about human effort.

------
MrBuddyCasino
I'd really like to get better at touch typing, is GNU Typist a solid
recommendation, or are there better ones?

~~~
artsyca
If you're serious about typing ditch the QWERTY layout and learn something
that's actually optimized for the language of your choice it's so naive to
attempt mastery of a broken paradigm without ever questioning that paradigm as
in the case of the broken and arbitrary key layout from 1873

------
DesiLurker
its attention much more than time, attention is compressed time.

------
yahyaheee
Power is currency

------
lerpapoo
some are worth more than others.

------
maitredusoi
As time does not exist and is just a perception of the spirit, it cannot be a
currency. Its apparence is too relative to oneself to have a scaling
process...

