On the importance of reading

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@Bojack

I’m sorry but your argument is falling apart. I thought you are happy to have a baby. And I’m sure your wife is happy to have you around for 2 extra hours. And if you want a time off from the kid, then I’m sure you can close the door or sit in front of the house with the book.

You’re advertising your commute as a magical time away from your family where you could read a book and you’re telling me that without an excuse of commuting you couldn’t explain your wife that you need some alone time?

Having a baby is huge source of happiness and tiredness and noise in the same time. You’re constantly short on time, energy and attention on almost everything else. It’s difficult to understand this for childless people because they think that anything that keeps you so busy and makes you so tired is by definition making you unhappy. This is not the case in case of babies - at least for most parents.

And for mothers this is even more true - mothers are very happy and very tired human beings. That’s why when I’m at home, I usually focus on helping out my wife. There’re priorities in life - first family, second selfish hobbies (like reading).

[Josh]

@Bojack

I think TV as a device is useful. It provides entertainment, I watch movies, TV series and YouTube. It’s just my hobby. However, I don’t watch TV as a medium, TV channels.

I don’t watch TV channels either. A Raspberry Pi doesn’t cost much and is a fantastic entertainment center. Netflix doesn’t have a fantastic catalog in Switzerland unfortunately, not enough to justify the cost IMHO.

[Julianek]

@Bojack: funny how you were the one complaining about not having time and now you return the situation by pointing at cracks in other peoples’ choices

Anyway, regarding time management and reading, I get by the following rule :

Saying “I don’t have time” is just another way of saying that I have other priorities. And it’s alright as long as you are aware of it and acknowledge it.

Starting from there, I look at everything by asking if it’s worth putting this time consuming activity at the top of my priorities list.

A few examples:

• Spending time reading and answering emails is clearly not my priority, but I have to do it anyway at work. Therefore, I only check emails at 11 am and 4:30 pm to see if I have to answer something. This avoids to have a fragmented day. Of course, I also de-activate Outlook notifications so I am not even aware that there are new emails coming in.
• I don’t read news. They are generally produced in such a format that they want to cater to your attention, and not add value to your life. Plus generally reading news leads to clicking to links and then other links and so on. Once I realized that i could not remember headlines from 2 months ago, I acknowledged that it does not add value to my life. So no more news. If anything interesting happens, I’ll know it through my friends anyway, but the signal/noise ratio is too high to even read news first hand.
• I deactivated all notifications on my phone so they don’t scream for my attention

You get the picture. In general, I try to run away from the attention-based current economy. Ironically, the only notifications I have are the one from this forum…

Now for books : I’ve found out that reading books is in most cases, much more time-efficient than trying to gather information on various websites. If the book is good, and the author dug its subject, then I don’t need to visit a dozen website on a given theme, and I will have more knowledge that if I would have done so. for instance, i found out that reading “Thinking, Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman gave me much much more insight on psychological biases, than just reading good blogs about it (yes, even Farnam Street!)

TLDR: don’t fall victim to the attention economy and ask yourself which activities you really want to spend time on.