Wastes of time
(Ethan: Rename this page “Inefficiency in people’s personal lives”, something along those lines. I would focus this page on inefficency, rather than “Wastes of time”, because it’s impossible to say what is a waste and what isn’t.)
This is pretty self-evident. People waste a huge amount of time on “non-productive things” (TV, lectures, comparison shopping, certain video games, social signalling, “short content” on social media, etc).
There’s the phrase “time you enjoy is not time wasted”, but even if we accounted for that, there are many areas for improvement.
regarding comparison shopping - see Simplify Decisions by Computing How Much Your Time Is Worth. in particular, the poor seem to spend a significant fraction of time “waiting” [there was a nytimes article on this long ago] and on logistics.
Perhaps on some wastes of time, like video games, try to at least optimize the amount of fun you get out of it per unit of time? Same with other things. Keep the waste of time, but optimize it.
