How ought I spend time?

I'm not a huge fan of books tbh, I find that it takes a lot of effort and wasted efficiency to shift through the noise, of which, books have a lot. I tend to prefer number 2 and then refer to 3 or 1 as is needed to advance 2. The hands on experience helps you retain and learn best in my humble opinion. Finally, I think the most important factor is your drive to do each of these. If I hit a roadblock on 2, I can try and power through in a suboptimal mindstate or take on 1 or 3 with reknewed enthusiasm. Therefore, I would prioritize 2 but use my time in such a way that I'm focused on whatever I'm most interested in at the time and in that sense pursuing the activity in which my valuable time nets the greatest result in any category.

Whether they feel motivating/exciting/interesting enough for me to actually carry them out. Things like "will this have an impact on anything" do get factored into that, e.g. completely pointless activities often feel less interesting. But my conscious mind only catches glimpses of that calculation, so I wouldn't call it "reasoning".

Funny you mention this as, starting tomorow, I am writing a script that tries to solve this issue.

The idea is to have an sql database that contains everything you want to do. The python script picks 2 entries and ask "If you die in a year from now, wich activity minimized regret the most?". The answer will probably be a cursor from activity1 <-> neutral <-> activity2. The scores are then calculated using the ELO scoring. This pair comparison algorithm allows to quickly rank your lifegoals by importance.

But that's only half of it. It will also ask "which activity takes the most time to complete?/If you had one hour, which would be a better investment?" to rank activities by time to complete (also using ELO).

If you do a few comparison a day and don't add too many entries you can then display a rank by "importance score minus by time score" to see what is the most important thing to you that also takes the less time. Or something like that. I expect some fine tuning for this.

The idea is to have an optimized and dynamic todolist that can help you to jungle between short time goals and life goals.

I'm thinking of managing my "toread" list the same way, but automatically deriving the time score from the length of the article.

What do you guys think? Any idea how to make this better? I just started and plan to learn quite a bit by trying to make this work. Any opinion is much appreciated. I will put this on github at the end. Should I publish it here also?

Btw, the idea came to me after reading through this : https://www.gwern.net/Resorter

Thanks gwern!

What granularity of time are you talking about? When you "never maintain 1 and 2 at the same time", is that any given minute, or any given decade? For me, "background learning" includes #1 and #3, and for a given quarter I'm usually 25-75 between learning and doing, but the ratio reverses for some periods when I don't know how to approach a project or what project I might want to do next. On the timeframe of weeks, I might be 100% on one of these, but on the timeframe of months, I _always_ have some project/build/do time and some research/explore time.

I try to never "grind" through a book. Most books are simply not that necessary, and those that are, I can usually get 80% of the value by skimming most of it. I do grind through papers sometimes, and I do grind through a chapter sometimes, but in both cases only after a bit of consideration about what I'm likely to get out of it.