Physical Time & Thought Time
Intro
As everything in our world gets digitized and automated we have a bifurcation of daily activities:
- Things that require your physical presence in linear time.
- Virtual things that can be done at the speed of thought.
For example: walking my dog or doing laundry simply requires my physical time and I cannot context switch between them. If I walk 20 minutes from my house I have to walk back for 20 minutes - I can't just start doing laundry part way through. I can hire it out but the task must be done without doing a major context switch in linear time.
Writing on the other hand, since it can be done digitally, can start and stop at any time. I can do it during work, while at the gym, during a call, and a million other places. The constraints are only the inputs (phone or computer keyboard) and booting up the context in your mind.
This is a relatively knew thing and I believe it deserves some specific thought on how to handle it.
How to Take Advantage of Thought Time
Creativity and Associative Thinking
In thought/digital time you can switch to LITERALLY anything else at ay time. You can interrupt what you're doing and instantly pull on any thread to the nth degree. You might be doing light reading but think of a relationship dynamic you want to work through, and then through that think of a business idea. Everything is on the table.
In this sense I believe it's useful to have at least some time where to let yourself wander and go down the path tugging at your mind. Sometimes this means being super associative and other times it simply means writing something down or finishing something to let your mind free.
Speed
You can also be tremendously fast - inputs (fingers on phones, keyboard typing, and voice) and the speed of your thoughts are the only constraints. One implication here is to invest in good voice transcription and to get fast at typing. For the former I've been trying out SuperWhispr and it is awesome. Highly recommend it.
Pitfalls
With opportunity comes challenge. Because thought time is unbounded it carries the burden of prioritization. Every time you sit down at your computer or open your phone you could do literally anything. From the most noble to the most base, the most long-term (start a business) to the most short-term (scroll social media). With that tremendous openness, it can feel hard to prioritize at any given moment - the monkey part of your brain will yearn for the easiest dopamine.
Said differently, all the negative potential things you can do - from time wasters to true moral negatives like pornography are bound by the same feeble constraints: just the speed of thought and your thumbs. I think the best way to deal with this is to add friction - it's not natural for vices to be literally at your fingertips (imagine if you could download cocaine in two taps).
Setting Up Constraints
We don't just sit in a full pantry all day. If we did we'd want to eat more just out of boredom. But food is tucked away, always, until when we need it.
What can I do concretely to help with this?
- Stop using the browser omnibox as a starting point. It requires summoning up all the context needed to do good working every single time I want to do it so I end up defaulting to quick dopamine hits like opening Twitter. I would go as far as to say that using the search box is actually bad.
- Set up separate desktops on my computer with work, personal, and side project contexts. Much easier to context switch this way and be prompted on what to do next because the context is already up.
How to Take Advantage of Physical Time
After puzzling on this for a while I think I only have three takeaways on how to optimize physical time:
- If you want to go fast put your phone away. Mixing physical time with podcasts, music, etc. makes it take way longer.
- If you don't care about speed combine it with thought time in the ways above. It can be sort of meditative and reduce the burden of physical time.
- Relationships are supercharged by physical time. There is no substitute for being in-person if you're trying to build a relationship.
If you have enough resources hire out physical time tasks as much as possible aside from relationship building and exercise.
Pitfalls of Physical Time
- Thought time always promises faster returns. On a short time frame opening twitter always is more fun than getting off your butt and doing something. But long run it’s not better.
- Above all having a vision