>Fast forward twenty years and I spend an inordinate amount of time on the internet...reading. Mostly I read science articles, CS/ML papers, wikipedia articles and watch videos from PBS, nerdwriter, 3blue1brown and the like, but I also comment here and on twitter, and surf memes on reddit.

Here's an exercise that's likely only useful once you are older than a certain age:

Look at all the time you spent in these activities in your life. Then ask: What have you achieved by it? Was it worth all that time? If you had spent only 60% of the time on it, what could you have done with the remaining 40%? Beyond a certain point, you run into diminishing returns.

I'm an information junkie too, and I occasionally use this to keep me grounded. I love learning new technologies, but how often do I apply them? How often is my goal to apply them, but I never start (or complete) because I go off and learn other things?

When you hit 35 (or 40, or 45) you may start thinking that there's no end to the knowledge you want to gain, and if you continue as you've always have, then your rate of progress will be the same till you die. That's quite OK if there is nothing else in life you want to achieve, but you really should ask yourself:

Are there things in life (unrelated to learning/reading) I want to do that I keep neglecting? Am I OK if I never get around to it?

When I think these things, I have a few guidelines:

1. I don't count knowledge I've gained as progress. I think of how that knowledge has meaningfully helped me, to the point that it is externally noticeable. The amount I've learned is no longer a metric for me. It's just that monkey that's trying to make me feel good. Don't give that monkey a chance!

2. When I read a nonfiction book, over 80% is forgotten within months. I promised myself a few years ago that I'll take notes, and put them on a blog, so I can review the book later on. This really slowed things down - I probably read only a fifth of the books I normally would. It is depressing at times, but so is realising that I've spent a lot of my life reading books that ultimately were of no use to me, even though they contained a ton of useful material. In retrospect, it was more entertainment than utility, and fiction is a much better way to entertain myself. If I just want to chill and relax, I'll read fiction.

3. At the beginning of 2018, I made a "Do-not-do" list. I wanted to focus on a few things, and did not want to get distracted. Most of the "do-not-do" list was technology related. I picked 1 or 2 that I hoped to do, and promised myself everything else on the list will be verboten until I accomplish the ones in the TODO. Sadly, I didn't consult that list throughout the year. I don't even know how well I did. I did keep the principle in my head, though, and actively forced myself to stop when tempted often during the year, so I'm sure I didn't do too poorly.

4. Keith Ferrazzi has a nice exercise that I never tried, but should. It's called the Personal Success Wheel. The basic idea is to separate your life into a bunch of categories. Examples: Professional growth, relationships, intellectual stimulation, physical health, spirituality, etc.

Then figure out how much time you want to spend on each. Assuming disjoint sets, the fractions should add up to 100%. For each category, split it up into concrete activities. Now comes the challenging part: Say you put 30% for intellectual stimulation. In a given month, that's 9 days. If you look at all the concrete activities you've listed for intellectual stimulation (e.g. learn Haskell, read tech blog, etc), how many have you listed? Say you've listed 9. So that means you can spend on average one day a month on that activity. That probably won't sound like much to you. Using his "wheel" keeps you honest about how much time you can spend on an activity, and how thin you'll end up being spread out. Likely then you'll prioritise and simply cut out lower value time gobblers. It's probably better to spend 3 or 4 days a month on something than one day.

I wrote the above from my memory, but here's a link from his site (I did not reread to see how well it matches my memory):

http://blog.mygreenlight.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/6-St...