Serious question: why is watching YouTube shorts a worse way to spend your time than eg debugging CUDA problems?
The answer is "opportunity cost". But who really believes in that?
I call it the batman fallacy. Many people (young men in particular) say to themselves "if I was more disciplined, I could dedicate my whole life to martial arts (or programming, or art, or w/e) and become batman (or John Carmack, or Van Gogh)". But it's not true, of course.
And it's the same with many managers. "Instead of spending x% on task A and y% on task B, why dont you spend (x-z)% on A and (y+z)% on B?" It's absurd.
Brute attempts to capture opportunity costs are doomed to fail. You squeeze one end (block youtube shorts) and it comes out the other (eg you argue with coworker). It's really much easier to stop punishing yourself for lost time and find happiness in who and where you are.
I agree with this article, however I think it misses the most valuable aspect of speed: compounded returns on experience.
Experience isn't 1:1 with time spent. It's easy to spend a lot of time on something but learn very little. Conversely, its possible to gain a large amount of experience in a short period of time.
By being able to develop faster, you become able to accumulate more experience in a smaller amount of time. This experience then enables you to develop faster, kicking off a virtuous cycle of growth.
Following this thought provides clarity on what action you should take immediately: do anything as long as its something. Through doing something, you will become more experienced and that experience will enable you to do something else even faster.
This is why you end up with so many aphorism in the industry promoting rapid action over inaction:
The answer is "opportunity cost". But who really believes in that?
I call it the batman fallacy. Many people (young men in particular) say to themselves "if I was more disciplined, I could dedicate my whole life to martial arts (or programming, or art, or w/e) and become batman (or John Carmack, or Van Gogh)". But it's not true, of course.
And it's the same with many managers. "Instead of spending x% on task A and y% on task B, why dont you spend (x-z)% on A and (y+z)% on B?" It's absurd.
Brute attempts to capture opportunity costs are doomed to fail. You squeeze one end (block youtube shorts) and it comes out the other (eg you argue with coworker). It's really much easier to stop punishing yourself for lost time and find happiness in who and where you are.