I read an essay titled “How to Lose Time and Money” on Paul Graham’s website.
The thesis of the essay?
People lose money not by spending it on outrageous luxuries but by making bad investment decisions. And they lose time not by vegetating in front of the TV but by doing the wrong kind of “work”. Paul argues that we have built-in filters to guard against unnecessary spending of time and money. It’s hard to go and splurge on a designer watch and not feel a little guilty. Or watch two movies back to back without thinking that there is something better that you can be doing. On the other hand, it’s really easy to invest half your savings on a new business venture that is ill-conceived. Or spend all your day checking email.
While most of us may have varying levels of money to spend wrongly, we all have equal amounts of time to squander away.
“The most dangerous way to lose time is not to spend it having fun, but to spend it doing fake work.” – Paul Graham
Examples of Fake Work among authors that are marketing their books online:
– Doing “research”
– Fixing computer problems
– Checking email once every 5 minutes
– Getting up to make coffee or tea
– Checking Facebook or Twitter status messages every few minutes
– Answering the phone
– Checking your Amazon Sales Rank
Have you noticed other authors doing ‘Fake Work’? What ‘Fake Work’ do you do? Any other examples of fake work among authors??
