Spending Time
I’ve spent the last couple years deeply reevaluating how I spend my time, and I’ve come to a heterodox conclusion:
Being online is not a waste of time. It’s actually a tremendous saver and optimizer and organizer of time.
This is only the case if one’s time is well prioritized to begin with, but if one’s day-to-day activity is reasonably well aligned with one’s values, applying the internet to support that activity can really open life up.
By now we are all familiar with the concept of “multitasking,” and I submit that multitasking is what it looks like when one tries to take advantage of time-saving technologies like the internet without being aligned by values. Without priorities grounded in what truly matters, one just flails around in the increased optionality without directing one’s energy at anything in particular.
Contrast this with the possibility of approaching one’s time online from the starting point of knowing what one wants to do. Let’s use a common motivation like “connecting with people,” which is a fundamental and good human value that is baked into the very purpose and structure of the internet. That’s certainly what drove me online during the lockdown era, and since I was far from alone in that drive, it was wildly successful. But as I spent more and more time online, it became clear that not all that time was equally well spent in service of that motivation to connect with people.
At first it was mostly a problem of negative side effects or consequences from certain ways of spending time online that diminished their value for making connections. I dealt with this by shifting and changing and moving around online, becoming restless, trying to find better fits where the connections were more worthwhile. I imagine this is a familiar description to most people online enough to be reading blog posts at this point.
But eventually the problem of spending time online became more complex. Some of the connections I was making online were leading to more valuable ways of spending time, beyond connecting for connection’s sake and into more productive realms that started aligning my time with more of my values. Most were not. This suggested I could be spending my time online in much better ways by redefining my value of connection with people.
Going online to connect with people had worked, but it was my other values that made it work. The things I value about life in general guided me to the right connections online, and they showed me how to zero in on them.
Then the way I wanted to spend time online changed.
The “multitasking mode” of connecting with people — consuming an endless feed of random stuff designed to keep me endlessly consuming random stuff — was no longer an efficient way to pursue the motivations that drove me online in the first place. This minority of deep connections I had found was aligned with the other stuff I wanted to do in life. Far from being a distraction, it was actually a massive boost to my life to nurture these online relationships. The question was how to do that as effectively as possible, without all those side effects — without wasting time.
Last night, I launched Householders, which is my answer to that question. I decided to design an entire online place around spending time in pursuit of the values I share with the people to whom I feel most connected. If I’ve done it correctly, this will draw me into spending ever more of my time online there — in a close-knit community of people who want to spend their time on Earth on the same things I do — and ever less in places and ways that are less supportive (or downright destructive).
By investing myself in the internet in accordance with my values, I’ll end up saving a lot of time.
Please consider joining Householders if you want to be a part of it.
