Info gain (new ideas * value/hour) on y axis, easiness (number hours without needing a break, a proxy for effort needed) on x axis.
Shapes aren’t correct (e.g. covariance).
I’ve frequently made efforts to cut news and sports highlights out of my life as they’ve felt low value per time. I had never quantified it before though — it was useful to think about how much better a good book or conversation was. This also helped me realize that sometimes I’m trying to use a poor substitue for news/sports scores — oftentimes I want a very low-effort, small commitment break, and something like a book is too long a commitment. See addicting things for what I think are better substitutes.
It feels like almost everyone, even people who feel similarly to me, and definitely including me, spend too much time in the entertainment bucket relative to its value. Part of this is that those things have been optimized for being addicting (see above link for more).
I was also surprised by how much more valuable I thought high quality deep work was vs. reading a good book / having a great conversation. This made me think that I should try harder to protect deep work time, and read at night when I have less willpower but don’t need as much.
“Effort” isn’t one thing / should be broken into many things.
Interesting how much worse I feel at 4h of sleep vs. 6h. I perceive myself to be ~2x worse at info gain and to need ~2x more effort.
