Some inspiring words for all of us struggling to make the most of our time:

"What you actively spend time on, and (far more difficult) what you choose not to do, who you choose not to spend time with, and who and what you decide to say no to — what you choose, then — is how you mark time. And that is all there is.

Time is the most valuable and finite commodity that any living thing has in this world... 

Therefore, treat it as the most precious thing in existence, because it is. Don’t squander a single second. Perhaps, even more importantly, don’t waste time regretting the time you do squander. Instead, look to how you are going to use this very moment to do something… Anything. Make a mark. Don’t worry about the next until the next comes along. This moment is far too important."

http://minimalmac.com/post/802344773/a-matter-of-time-bobulate

A 2009 Nielsen study reveals that "the average American television viewer is watching more than 151 hours of television per month".

A full-time job is just 160 hours a month. Don't have time to realize your dreams? Turn off your TV until you do.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/SHOWBIZ/TV/02/24/us.video.nielsen/

Paul Graham recently wrote about peering through the cliched simile, "Time is Money", to see some deeper similarities between time and money in our built in alerts about waste:

It's hard to spend a fortune without noticing. Someone with ordinary tastes would find it hard to blow through more than a few tens of thousands of dollars without thinking "wow, I'm spending a lot of money."

Paul asserts that lots of money can't be wasted all at once by spending without setting off an internal alarm (that you can then chose to heed or ignore). He also thinks huge chunks of time can't be wasted all at once without setting off similar alarms. I might easily lose 30 minutes a day watching TV, but I'm not likely to decide to spend 12 hours straight on the couch watching TV and not trigger an internal alarm or two.

But Paul points out that there is a way to waste huge sums of money without triggering our alarms, in bad investments:

Investing bypasses those alarms. You're not spending the money; you're just moving it from one asset to another. Which is why people trying to sell you expensive things say "it's an investment."

This rings true to me. I know my wife and I consider our house an investment, otherwise we never could have brought ourselves to spend that much money on one thing. And the housing bubble has taught us all a thing or two about safe investments.

Here's where Paul brings something very interesting to the table. Are there time "investments" that can bypass our alarms?

A few days ago I realized something surprising: the situation with time is much the same as with money. The most dangerous way to lose time is not to spend it having fun, but to spend it doing fake work... alarms don't go off on the days when I get nothing done, because I'm doing stuff that seems, superficially, like real work. Dealing with email, for example. You do it sitting at a desk. It's not fun. So it must be work...With time, as with money, avoiding pleasure is no longer enough to protect you.

That's quite a thought. We can waste huge swaths of time doing things that feel very productive, but which we don't value. Two years for that MBA when we really want to be a entreprenuer? 4 years in college when we really want to be a chef? A mind numbing 9 to 5 office job when we really want to write? 12 hours a week volunteering for the church when all we really want is more time with our kids?

It's not just about the half hour spent in email, or the hour in front of the TV. Make sure your big time investments are as valuable to yourself as the time you are putting into them, ignoring what other people or society might think. Because another place where the "Time is Money" cliche breaks down is that we can always make more money, but none of us can make more time.

I'll leave the heady question about speeding up time to the physicists, but why would you want to? I'm always trying (in vain) to slow down time. What you can speed up is BubbleTimer. It's now been 2 weeks since BubbleTimer's servers got a major upgrade. There is now roughly 6 times the computing power on tap as there was before, and a key piece of system software was upgraded as well, and it is delivering additonal performance improvements on the software side.

I kept the announcement fairly quiet, other than mentioning the maintenance window (BubbleTimer was down for about 15 minutes during the cut over to the new servers). I didn't want to announce that a big performance increase was imminent and then dissapoint if the improvements didn't live up to my expectations.

Now that I have 2 weeks of performance numbers in, I can safely say that for the slowest operation, navigating to a different day, BubbleTimer is about 4 times faster than it was. Similar improvements exist across the other operations that were computationally intensive, but since those were not as noticably slow, you're less likely to recognize the improvements.

I hope better performance increases your enjoyment of BubbleTimer and encourages you to use it, when you need to, to keep yourself on track with how your spending your time. It's no fair having an activity called waiting on BubbleTimer anymore!

As my first step to making sure the BubbleTimer community gets the great support it deserves after the email SNAFU, I've implemented a live chat support based on technology from a brand new startup, olark.

So far, I've found it to be pretty simple to use on both ends of the conversation. Next time you have any trouble or questions, try it out and let me know what you think (chances are, I will ask!)

The link to use it is down in the footer next to the 866 support number (feel free to use that too):

Once you click it, here is what the start of a chat session looks like:

And then here is what it looks like when we are chatting:

There is a little glitch where if you click the live chat and then close it down you can't open it back up without refreshing the page. I'm going to work with olark to resolve that.

I'm still working through the backlog of support emails. It might take me into the first part of the week to get through them so if you are stil waiting for a response from me, please be patient. I will get through them all.

I owe the BubbleTimer user community a gigantic apology. I got an email from a user this morning following up on a how to question that we'd emailed about earlier in the week. She was thanking me for the answer I provided, but also mentioned she'd wished I'd been able to help when she first asked about it a month ago. I thought this was odd because I didn't remember having heard from her before, so I followed up with her, and to cut my long story short, after forwarding some emails to me that she'd sent, I figured out she'd sent them properly, I just hadn't got her emails.

In researching this, I discovered the mail queue on the mail server that handles the BubbleTimer support email had over 300 messages queued up from as long ago as June and July that show on the server but not in my inbox.

I'm able to get to the emails through the server's mail interface, and it turns out, just over 50% of them were spam that got past the spam filters, but that still leaves about 150 support and information requests (about 1/5 of those were notifications of new discussions/questions in the support forum) in the past 3 months that never got a reply or acknowledgement. I'm very sorry about this. I'm working through them as quickly as possible. I got through the first 25 or so this morning and I expect to get the rest answered this weekend.

If the support emails had dropped to 0 overnight, I'd notice within a day or two, but I'd guess that 150 messages represents roughly half of the overall support emails in that period, so I never really noticed anything fishy until I was taken to task by a user this morning. I was vaguely aware of less support volume for BubbleTimer but I just figured people take it easy more over the summer months. There is a fairly high percentage of students and academics that use BubbleTimer for instance.

I don't know yet what the problem is or what makes some messages make it to the inbox and others not. As soon as I get through the backlog I'm going to rework the mail handling for the bubbletimer.com domain to avoid the potential of this happening to new emails.

So in summary: I'm very sorry if you didn't get a response from me recently. You will within the next couple of days. No email was lost, so no need to resend. I'm reworking the setup to avoid even the potential for this problem. Thanks for your patience as I get caught up.

In my last post about the future of attention, I brought up the question of attention as a scarce resource (the analogy from Michael Erard was to money). If you accept that, then a natural question is how to increase your amount of this resource, just like the an obvious economic question is how to get more money. (As soon as you start making analogies to economics, you start talking about pie, and so we have the attention pie.)

Michael Erard brought up the interesting question of increasing the size of the pie, rather than optimizing the allocation of the pie slices. It's good to draw some boundaries around the question of increasing the attention pie. It would seem that the only way to literally increase the time available for attention would be to decrease the time not available to attention, which I suppose is time spent unconscious. We can include sleep in that (lucid dreamers, bite your tongues), and time when you're dead.

So less sleep or a longer life.... given what medicine knows about sleep, it could be that less sleep shortens your life, so maybe that's a zero sum game. I think we can certainly say that time spent on "preventive medicine" such as eating healthy and exercising is a likely boost in your long-term attention pie.

The boost to the attention pie that got me excited was not so literal. There is the amount of time spent inattentively (or, with my BubbleTimer hat on, I might say unintentionally) and there is the question of the quality of the attention. The boost to the attention pie I first considered was time spent inattentively, but the quality of attention is very interesting, how do you improve that?

It would seem that quality of attention and length of attention are strongly correlated. There are the studies on getting into the creative zone (as opposed to the athletic zone of elite athletes) and how much time that takes (early consensus seems to say 15 minutes) and how easy it is to be interrupted.

So, at Ian Varley's prompting,  I've clarified the question a bit. It's not a question of literal conscious time available but more a question of how that time is allocated across inattention, low-quality attention and high quality attention.

One last note before I wrap, I may have misread this quote from Michael Erard because even though we are talking about the same thing, I think he maybe missing a key word or two:

We need...someone to inspire us away from the fight over smaller and smaller pieces of the attention pie. Someone who will inspire us to make the attention pie bigger.

He talks about smaller and smaller pieces of the attention pie, really a complaint about attention fragmentation, but then says the answer is making the attention pie bigger. I think we can restate this quote to better fit our revised question this way:

We need...someone to inspire us away from the fight over smaller and smaller pieces of the attention pie. Someone who will inspire us to make the attention pie [slices] bigger[, better and intentionally allocated].

It's been awhile since I've made a post on Being and Time. My apologies. I've been writing a book and struggling with some time management issues of my own (the same issues that led me to create BubbleTimer). Having said that, I have also been inspired in the last couple of weeks with some really great stuff I've been reading about the broader and more philosophical questions of time management. I've got the itch back to write here. This is after-all the worlds only blog about the Philosophy of Time Management (as far as I know), and there is nothing like writing (and responding to feedback) to clarify your own thoughts.

One of the articles that captured my attention (pun intended) recently is "A Short Manifesto on the Future of Attention" by Michael Erard. It's a provocative article that describes a possible future economy based on attention rather than money. I don't think this will come to fruition, and I don't think Michael does either, it's more of a thought experiment. But there are some true gems in the short article that I'd like to point out and respond to.

In 1971, the oft-quoted political scientist Herbert Simon predicted that in an information age, cultural producers (that's designers, but also filmmakers, theater types, musicians, artists) would quickly face a shortage of attention. "What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients," he wrote. The more information, the less attention, and "the need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it."

Herbert Simon was clearly ahead of his time. His words, which might have seemed a little whacky in 1971 (I wasn't alive, I assume they would have), have come true.

We need...someone to inspire us away from the fight over smaller and smaller pieces of the attention pie. Someone who will inspire us to make the attention pie bigger.

These are two sentences that you could easily spend an entire year unraveling, if not a whole career. There is a lot of philosophy, research, experimentation and engineering that could (and should) go on in response to these 2 sentences.

First, philosophical: Is it possible to make the attention pie bigger? Does that conceptually even make sense? What would a bigger attention pie be like? Would it be a positive development?

If you made sufficient progress on the philosophical questions, you would understand the problem enough to move onto some research. Has anyone tried this something like this? What success did they have... what worked? What failed? Unless your research led you to an answer that had been hypothesized and proven through experiment, but that nobody knows about (in which case you'd go into evangelism mode), your next step would be to design some experiments informed by the philosophy and the research to see if it is in fact possible to grow the attention pie.

Some successful experiments in making the attention pie bigger would lead me to immediately try to create one or more practical implementations, since ultimately, I'm of two minds, the philosopher and the engineer, and I have an innate drive to create practical solutions.

Skipping some of Michael's thoughts on attention festivals and a possible attention economy (both seem just a bit whacky to me), Michael does get to some comments about possible practical solutions in the form of attention related software.

I imagine software, a smartphone app, perhaps, you can use to audit your attentional expenditures. So that before you embark on trying to write a book, you will be able to see how much time you spent reading books over the last month or year. So that before you design a marketing campaign that assumes that people aren't doing much else with their time until you show up, you will be able to see what you yourself were doing with your time, which was something perfectly good. This will show you that you're a savvy allocator of your attentional resources — and so is everybody else.

BubbleTimer and some other software solutions are very early attempts to provide attentional software. I'm writing this right now in WriteRoom, an attempt, via software, to engineer human attention. Another attentional (is that a word?) application I was just made aware of is Think. What do you think (will the puns ever stop?) about these early attempts? Are they on the right track? If so, what's missing? What's the next step? And, as is always important to me, how do we take that next step but keep the tools so simple and fun that people actually want to use them?

I'll wrap up for now by returning the bigger question. Do we need to make the attention pie bigger rather than worry so much about how we allocate the fixed pie? I'm not sure yet since I'm still at step 1, unsure if the concept of a bigger attention pie makes any sense. If I only had more time to pursue this... oh, the irony.

I just happened to be on the server, doing a little maintenance this morning and I noticed the bubble count on the admin. page was 499,998. I refreshed and it was 500,003. What are the odds? We are running a contest for the 500,000th bubble and I happen to be there to witness it.

The database tells me the lucky 500,000th bubble belongs to James, a 2nd day trial user from London. James now gets a free account for life. Congratulations James! And congratulations to the BubbleTimer community for tracking over 7 and a half million minutes. That's a lot of minutes!

As a side note to the contest, while digging out the 500,000th bubble, the database also told me there have been 628,105 bubbles created, even though there are just over 500,000 in the database. This tells me that roughly 20% of the time we change our mind over what to bubble. What a fickle bunch we are!

Since bubbles can go away, there are two interpretations to the contest. There is the 500,000th bubble stored in the database, and the 500,000th bubble ever created. I had the former in mind, but by the latter measure, we have a different winner, and in fact, we had a winner a month or so ago before the contest even started. How's that for a little psuedo time travel

Alas, we can't know who that winner was because when I checked the database it turns out that the 500,000th bubble is part of that fickle 20%. It is gone, having been replaced by another bubble. Whoever you are, Mr. or Mrs. 500,000th bubbler, we salute you along with James.

I've always made it a point to only say nice things about competitors. I go out of my way to recommend competitors when I think they can solve someone's problem better than I can.

I regularly recommend the Emergent Task Timer PDF to people looking for something more free form or inexpensive than BubbleTimer. I recommend Harvest to big teams, and Moleskine notebooks to people on the go without an iPhone. I just recently endorsed another developer here in Chapel Hill when a prospect mentioned he was going to interview him for the project I was in the middle of pitching.

Today however, I'm going to make an exeption to my rule and say something negative. Until recently I've recommended RescueTime to people that felt bubbling their time in 15 minutes was too manual. RescueTime is a Web application but has some software you install on your computer as well. It works by watching your activities, recording how much time you spend using each application, even recording how much time you spend on which documents and which Web pages. RescueTime is not right for everyone, since it only captures your activities on the computer, and unlike me, not everyone is glued to their computer for every waking moment (that must be nice!). But for people who spend most of the time they want to track working on the computer, RescueTime was a very good option with some truly excellent reporting capabilities.

RescueTime started out with more or less the same goals as BubbleTimer, to help people become more productive and aware of how they are spending their time. Lately RescueTime has taken what I consider to be a very sinister turn, positioning their software as a way for employers to track employees time use. It must be working for them because they are ratcheting it up with a new product that takes it to another level. Their latest offering completely abandons the facade that they still care about helping people be more productive and only allows the employer to see the results.

"Employee monitoring can't be seen/paused by the user."

"Reports on how people are spending time can be seen by the manager only."

Unlike many professions where ethical decisions must be made everyday (police, politician, judge, lawyer, clergy, teacher), we in the software business are often (though not always) engaged in ethically inert pursuits. I've always found it very easy to steer clear of ethically dubious development, which is what makes this so hard to understand for me. Why are they doing this? The answer they themselves give is because that's where it seems they can make the most money. It's a sad day.

I'm a staunch civil libertarian and defender of the fundamental right to privacy and frankly, these guys are starting to creep me out. In my opinion RescueTime is casting a long, dark shadow on the time management software marketplace that I reject. I disown them. I'm not even going to think of these guys as a competitor anymore. They are dead to me. I put them in the same camp as the makers of spy cameras, key stroke capturing software, and other seedy junk.

I'm interested in your thoughts. Am I out of it? Overreacting? The only one that feels this way? Or do you think these guys are starting to produce unethical software?

Photo by laverrue.