Time Wasters: What & Why To Avoid

The older I get the less time I have left until death. Or to eventual decline, or the possible chronic sickness and incapacity which typically precedes death, especially for the retired and elderly.

I also find I have learned to value my free time even more than when I was young. I appreciate the "cost" of time much more. In terms of its alternate uses available to me, and in terms of the "labor & hassle & holding my distaste" type of trades I had to make in order for me to "earn" that and accrue that spendable free time.

Because of all that above, I think, I have also come to develop a strict policy of eliminating or at least minimizing my exposure to anything which is likely to waste my time. Based on past direct experience. That set of things includes, at a minimum:

* GUIs

* any non-Unixy/Terminal/shell/CLI based workflow or tools

* commutes

* jerks & bullies

* flakes & teases

* meeting counter-parties who don't prepare adequately beforehand (eg. an interviewer who doesn’t read one’s resume before the call, or asks one questions clearly answered by it, and on page one)

* lower pay vs higher

* interruptions or distractions while working

* manual processes which could have been automated

* tasks done personally which could have been delegated (assuming done right)

* bureaucracy

* paperwork & forms

* lies & propaganda

* incorrect or out-of-date information

* poor predictors

* poor tools

* forced to use poor tools

* forced to use tools I'm not already well ramped up on & prefer

* tools/apps/services/people who don't do what I say, but rather what they think I mean -- but I did not, and instead had said what I meant exactly

* being asked questions the asker has no need to do (eg. snoopy privacy invasions by surveillance govs/corps)

* any unneeded latency/delays added to my workflows, esp for daily and frequently performed tasks or those in tight loops (eg. in the “think, code, test, document, commit, push" loop)

* waiting for others to do a thing vs doing it myself immediately when needed, and exactly how I prefer it

* "slow food" sitdown restaurants

* huge stores with huge parking lots

* driving, period (see commutes)

* small cups vs large

* hard to read text fonts, sizes, color sets. whether on screen or on physical packaging (eg. pill bottles or nutrition labels)

* bad accents by others: my brain forced to parse their speech, in real-time, into the correct words for the given language

* pest species

* messy foods

* unnecessary emo drama (eg. drama queens)

* non-bingeable series or seasons of TV/video shows

* movie theatres

* weak computer hardware

* waiting for a computer to (re)boot

* browser popups

* spam

* commercials

* unpredicable service providers or store stocking