How to waste less time
Come for what you think are productivity hacks, stay for the questions
Ask yourself a question: are you wasting your time?
I don’t mean right now. You’re reading a Footbridge post, which is never a waste! What I mean is, are you wasting your time generally? At your job, on your couch, on holiday, commuting from place to place, and throughout any other pockets of waking life. If so, it’s quite possible that you’re deeply tired and frustrated while confused as to why that’s the case. Well, the bad news is I don’t have an antidote. The good news (which is more of a silver lining) is that you’ve already read the explanation. But I’ll say it as a statement this time: you’re wasting your time.
I don’t say this from my high horse. I say it from our common low ground, because I am also wasting my time. No matter how diligently I orient my life around what really matters to me—family, community, stimulating work, creative outlets, growth-inducing experiences—I waste a lot of time. No matter how hard I try to stay present—through journaling, meditation, mindfulness as a general practice—I waste so, so much time.
Our collective attention crisis has a lot to do with this. Without question, I reach for my phone much more often than I’d like. I do this as a way to fill what feels like dead space but really could give rise to so much. Even just plain boredom would probably be better for me than 30 seconds or 30 minutes of scrolling or whatever it is I do on my phone when there isn’t something useful to act on or respond to. Truly, just allowing myself to do absolutely nothing, and neither reach for a quick escape nor freak out about stillness, would be wonderful.
I also think this type of malaise is a fairly Western condition, within which there’s a specific strain of American drudgery. The American Life is Killing You, a barn burner of an essay on the perils of achieving in the capitalist system, might be a bit on the nose with its approach, but it at least paints a vivid picture of what many Americans seem to experience.
“You’re enduring some type of chronic illness, over-stressed and rushed, unrewarding job, little or no savings, greatly in debt, fat mortgage, two vehicles in the driveway with a 5 or 7-year loan on each, lots of gadgets and toys to keep you occupied, huge TV, little free time for yourself due to your career and a demanding spouse, weekends filled with church and/or senseless entertainment, and a bathroom cabinet heavily stacked with pharmaceutical tic tacs to help cope with the emptiness of it all.”
Now, there’s a lot of Fight Club-esque railing against consumerism and capitalism in the piece, as well as a sprinkle of Matrix-esque “unplug from the machine” advice presented as the remedy to what ails us all. It’s also worth noting that this was published on February 1, 2020, on the eve of a rather consequential global event that could be viewed as a correction to many of the systemic forces discussed in the essay—if we didn’t go right back to the whole basic structure within a couple of years. While I get these criticisms and have to say that, personally, I sure wouldn’t mind touching more grass and making more art and all that, the fact of the matter is that I and you and we all exist in a system, no matter how infuriating that can be at times. Opting out entirely to renounce material possessions and live in the woods is certainly an option, but not a realistic one for most, and because it exists in a direct relationship to what is being spurned, it’s still somewhat a part of it. Jumping ship to an entirely different school of thought and the culture it breeds—a more Eastern system, let’s say—presents similar challenges in that you can easily find like-minded people in Western society, but what you’ll create together is a bubble inside a vast, roiling soup. We all live on the same planet (for the foreseeable future), where there are limited resources and more or less a common conception of time. So what is to be done with it?
Well, if you “spend” a lot of it online, you might find that the general vibe you encounter is…not great? In its heyday, Twitter’s cultural dominance of the 2010s was certainly something—a place where (among other things) writers, comedians, and depressed people who were neither routinely expressed their mental health struggles openly. The crazy thing is that compared to the ultra-loud, media-rich, attention-span-killing social media environment of 2025 (disclosure: I work at Meta!), it was basically a warm hug. This kind of environment seems like a good one to avoid, right? Absolutely. The problem is, it’s where people increasingly get their information and stay in touch with what’s happening in the world. To stay informed, you can either drink from a firehose of nonsense, bad vibes, slop, and outright disinformation and do your best to sift through it to find the good stuff, or you can turn the hose off completely. Trying to land somewhere in between is like aiming for safe harbor on an upward-pointing isosceles triangle whose equal sides are sloped at 89 degrees and slicked with oil.
How, then? How can one operate in the present world day-to-day, knowing enough to be a well-informed citizen but not so much that they become frustrated, exhausted, paralyzed? How can one work and study and expand to the fullest without the dreaded burnout weighing down their ability to thrive? There are many essays and books and programs that explore this balance—Jenny Odell’s work and the concept of “I would prefer not to” are a good introduction to it—but I suspect the solution, if there really is one, is highly personal. While finding balance such that we feel less time is wasted and more is “well spent” could be said to require holding at once two seemingly add-odds truths (operating within a system and wanting something better), one’s place in a system is probably just as varied and unique as their mental model for what “better” might be. Someone could prescribe you a quick fix or a comprehensive plan, but both are equally a projection of what’s worked for someone else, and best applied in a customized way as merely one in a suite of tools that could push you in the general direction you want to go.
So, if you’ve read over a thousand words hoping to get some answers…sorry. To be fair, I did say at the top I don’t have an antidote. At the very least I hope you find it as valuable as I do to simply ask a lot of questions of our common reality. It’s a whole lot better than just accepting it at face value and continuing to let the time slip away. Isn’t it?
One of your best pieces Victor, not that I like the important questions/challenges you raise but because you raise them so clearly and thought provokingly. I read something recently that read “time is measured in attention, not minutes “ so I agree with your comment that our collective attention crisis has a lot to do with all this wasted time.
Can the point be that there is no point while we also acknowledge that pointlessness is the problem?