Another huge time-suck is online entertainment, especially when it masquerades as work-related or educational. I was spending easily two hours a day on sites like hacker news and twitter. This is apparently below average.

The opportunity cost is huge - 2 hours per work day is 500 hours per year. Maybe I learned something from that aimless browsing

If you can focus hard on something for at least a few hours per day for several years, you will get good at it. The main obstacle to doing so is being a poorly-designed meat machine, beset by anxiety, doubt, frustration, depression, arrogance etc. So I've come to believe that managing those emotions is the main component of being good at anything.

There is always more work that could be done than I could possibly do in a lifetime. So I find it really important not to think of work as a todo list that I'm trying to get through - that's a crushing burden. Instead I just focus on the idea that my time is finite and that I want to spend it well each day.

The same applies to comparing myself to other people. There are always people who are orders of magnitude more skilled or accomplished, but we're all chipping away together at the infinite pile of work. So it's not about whether I'm better or worse than other people, but about contributing as much as I can:

Digital Minimalism has this quote from