![]() W e all have frittered away time on one thing at the expense of another, more valuable thing and kicked ourselves for it later. These instances of wasted time can be a source of anxiety and regret, but in reality, they are a valuable resource: If we train ourselves to avoid wasting our minutes, we will have discovered a new reservoir of time that we can use in joyful and productive ways. There are really only two ways that time can be truly “wasted”: when you engage in something that crowds out more productive or edifying activities, and when you deliberately engage in something that, on balance, you don’t actually even like. I am not arguing that non-work activities are necessarily a waste of time quite the contrary, there is plenty of evidence that time spent daydreaming and enjoying non-work pursuits can lead to not just happiness but also better work performance and higher creativity. Want to stay current with Arthur's writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out. That’s a lot, but still less time than the three hours and 46 minutes people spent staring at their smartphones. The average American spent three hours and 43 minutes every day watching live TV in the first quarter of 2020, according to Nielsen. Many of the pastimes on which we while away huge portions of our lives feel good in the moment but bring us anxiety and regret when we manage to tear ourselves away. Without thinking about it, we are spectacularly failing some cosmic cost-benefit test, as measured not in money but in what matters most: time. ![]() Rather, he argued that we waste too much of our lives on things we don’t value. ![]() Thoreau’s point is not that we should be all work and no play-he was one of history’s most prominent critics of that way of living. “The cost of a thing,” he wrote in Walden, “is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.” It turned out to be a fitting choice, as Thoreau has quite a bit to say about wasting time. T he other afternoon, in an effort to avoid doing my work, I picked up Henry David Thoreau’s Walden. ![]() “And when we are able to meet his or her expectations and make him or her happy, it makes me happy too.“ How to Build a Life ” is a weekly column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness. “If the customer is willing to send his or her toy to get it fixed, it means that this toy is very precious to him or her,” said Ms Theng. Now, she is able to explain the procedures better to her customers and updates them constantly while the toy is in the “hospital”.Īt the end of the day, what keep the people behind these “toy hospitals” going are the smiles they are able to put on the faces of their customers. “Sometimes, a slight difference to us can be very, very different for a customer.” Even for us, we do not have a fixed visual representation of how the final product will look. Ms Cher said: “We should have communicated better with the customer to manage her expectations. In the first year of operation, one of her customers broke out in tears upon collecting a reworked toy as the changes were not what she expected. While tackling each different toy is tough, it is managing customers’ expectations that is the hardest part of the job.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |