2020-07-19 // (online) time spent wisely
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Stumbled across a brief writing by Donald Knuth [0] where he writes
about no longer using email, preferring mailed correspondence so that he
can deeply focus on hard problems. Aside from being dated -- secretary
and all -- I kind of like the cut of his jib. At least, as it relates to
modern social media.

I've poked around on Mastodon for the last few days and realized that
it's as much of a time sink as the commercial social media it's modelled
after. I haven't clocked how much time I've spent on it, but I recognize
already that it's high cost, low reward. Plenty of scrolling, not much
actual interaction with other people.

At work, I've cultivated habits of deep work [1], largely stemming from
having read Cal Newport's book on the topic. That is, I have periods of
shallow work, and at least one or two solid blocks of deep work time.
Headphones in, programming solidly for a few hours, no distractions.
It's a necessity or else I'd get nothing of value accomplished.

At home, my adherence to deep work wanes. Perhaps it's the habit of it,
but I'll often find myself scrolling reddit or somesuch. I tell myself
it's "decompression time." Not much of value is gained from doing so.
Memes are viewed and minutes are lost.

I think I need to be more mindful of my leisure time -- exercise,
reading/writing on gopher, conversations with friends, reading, even
gaming; these are all activities that I enjoy that could be classed into
"deep work" of my leisure time. Scrolling on reddit or Mastodon, then,
would be the shallows to be avoided.

It's kind of wild how easy it is to fall into the trap of "oh, I'll just
do that for a few minutes." I don't think I'll be poking around Mastodon
again anytime soon.

I can't remember where I read it, probably in Cal Newport's "Digital
Minimalism," but someone classified their social interactions into high
quality and low quality time. Text messages, social media -- these
things take a while to do but are, essentially, low-bandwidth in nature.
Phone conversations, video chats, meeting up in person -- these are the
high-bandwidth alternatives we could be focusing on. A lot more can be
conveyed with tone of voice and body language than you can do in, say,
140 characters (or 500 for Mastodon).

That said, I think email and phlogging/gemlogging are worthwhile. In
our small Internet world of pseudonyms, it is perhaps the highest
quality interaction we can have without actually calling each other or
videochatting. I've thoroughly enjoyed every email sent to me here on
the small Internet. :)

Until next time!

kvothe@SDF.ORG

[0]: https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html
[1]: https://doist.com/blog/deep-work/