Take a look at Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: most of your needs are being met right now. But you’re also devoting most of your life to maintaining them.

The biggest portion of your day is spent working for money. Most of your money goes to buy physiological needs: shelter, food, transportation.

Other than that you spend a lot of time sleeping, eating and cleaning. You spend time unwinding and socializing mostly just to stay sane. My point is that I might be spending more time on details than you, but almost all of your time is spent fighting entropy one way or another.

Our society is very focused on the idea that you should be accomplishing something important all the time. But is that reasonable to given how much time we have to spend just living? Instead, I think you should be measured on whether you do everyday tasks with grace. Is your life aesthetically pleasing?

I’ve been running a GTD system in my personal life for a few months now. Little things used to just slip through the cracks and then I’d feel guilty about forgetting about them. I used to feel bad doing frivolous activities because I had a vague sense that there was something else I should be doing. It feels great to finish things and see my task list shrink.

GTD is supposed to make you always aware of “what you’re not doing” so that you can choose not to do things without the sinking feeling that you’re forgetting something. One of the biggest problems in my life right now is that when I know everything I could be doing, I try to do as much of it as possible:

• I schedule outings to hit a bunch of non-@home tasks
• When I get home I try to crank through as many @homes as I can
• I resent things that distract me from cranking through tasks like people who always want to chat online
• When my task list starts to build up, I cancel frivolous activities to spend more time completing tasks
• I don’t get to bed on time

I feel like my life is focused on fighting entropy. Instead of having fun and living with the consequences later, I’m doing Right Action more often. But is it better to be responsible or become comfortable with being irresponsible?

It actually took me a long time to get around to writing this post: no joke.

This random website proposes that a procrastinator experiences time like this:

Although that may technically be accurate, I don’t personally feel anything like a time distortion. Instead, I underestimate the number of tasks I want to complete (eg: packing a house) and the duration of each task. David Seah notes that procrastination can be caused by either a poor sense of time or an obsession with last-minute details. I suffer from a combination.

So although a clock based on the theory of time diagrammed above may work to increase my timeliness, it would have to be recalibrated for every deadline (things to do before I leave in the morning, things to do before coffee break, etc.). Seah has designed a much better clock: it runs fast by a random and always changing amount of time. Now I just need someone to implement it for the iPhone.