3.e 审计时间开销

Make Time Your Friend 3.e: Auditing How You Spend Time

> By Li Xiaolai · 2008-05-18 · [Original (web archive)](https://web.archive.org/web/20111113093858/http://www.lixiaolai.com/archives/431.html) (Chinese)
> Our translation from the Chinese original.

By now you have been recording your time spending for many days in a row. You have two habits: making a time budget every morning, and recording your time spending every evening. So another habit follows very naturally: once a week, pick a day and spend an hour auditing your budget and your actual spending for that week. In fact, every evening, while recording your time spending, you are already involuntarily auditing that day's budget and actual spending.

When you look through last week's records of your time spending, you will find that some items are fixed expenses, for example your sleeping time, eating time, washing-up time, exercise time and so on. Other time goes on unexpected expenses, such as attending a friend's birthday party, being stuck in traffic for a whole hour on the way somewhere, or the computer suddenly having a problem so that work has to stop, and so on.

After a week or so of recording, observing, reviewing and thinking, you will understand that some things no longer need to be recorded—for example, most of those fixed expenses. And at the same time, when you make your time budget every morning, you will no longer be so naive as to fill up every minute—because you now know more clearly, and calmly accept, that something unexpected always comes up.

Although there is never enough time, you really don't have to cut time costs from every single place. Some people only know the simplest, crudest ways of cutting time costs—for example, staying up all night without sleeping, or simply forgetting to eat; even, if they have a lot of things to do and don't need to go out today, simply not washing their face or brushing their teeth—and of course, some go even further and don't wash their face or brush their teeth even when they do go out!

The most direct way to raise how efficiently you use time is to do two things at the same time.

Ha, "do only one thing at a time" is the iron rule that all the so-called experts drum into you over and over again. But that way of putting it of theirs is obviously oversimplified. [Translator's note: the original writes 他们哪种说法 ("which way of putting it of theirs"), a slip for 他们那种说法, "that way of putting it of theirs"; translated by the intended sense] In fact, from roughly the time you were able to remember things, your brain has already been a perfect multitasking operating system—and I bet it is far better than that wretched Windows operating system used on your computer! You have always been able to eat while watching TV; you can, and often do, read while listening to music; or, for another example, you can observe that two other people can each be thinking their own thoughts while talking to each other……

The trick to doing two things at the same time is: 1) one of them had better be mechanical, with little skill involved; 2) the other should not especially need a lot of brainpower to support it; 3) both should be things that are genuinely useful and therefore worth investing time in. For example, when I go to the gym to run, I can often take my MP3 player and listen to a whole Lecture from one of the Teaching Company's course series. At that moment I am doing two things at the same time: running to exercise my body, and taking in new knowledge.

In this case, all three conditions are met. 1) Running to exercise (in fact almost every activity in a gym is like this) is a fairly mechanical activity that requires almost no brainpower at all; 2) listening to an audio book, although it takes brainpower, actually doesn't require 100% concentration either; 3) exercise means a great deal to me, and listening to an audio book is, for me, more useful than listening to pop songs—of course, another reason is that classical music is too highbrow for me; I have never managed to experience its legendary beauty.

Sometimes doing two things at the same time is rather hard. [Translator's note: the original writes 同时做两件事儿时比较难的 ("when doing two things at the same time, rather hard"), a slip for 是比较难的, "is rather hard"; translated by the intended sense] For example, while memorizing vocabulary, it is very hard to listen at the same time to a singer with clear diction singing an extremely catchy tune; while writing an article, watching a thriller with a complicated plot at the same time is harder still. Please look for yourself: which of the three conditions above do these two situations fail to meet? Imagine why the so-called multitasking operating system Windows crashes, and you will know.

Please do a small exercise. Look at your time spending bill: which things could be done at the same time while meeting the three conditions above? List them, and pick out one pair that you yourself feel would be most likely and easiest to achieve, as your starting exercise. In less than a week, you will find that this is actually a skill that is very easy to learn. And because it is easy to learn and lets you feel its effect very quickly, it will make it hard for you not to become obsessed with this skill—by then, you will find it even easier to discover things you can do at the same time.

Here is a small explanation: the better someone's memory, the more likely they are to be able to handle two tasks at the same time. If you compare yourself to a computer, then your ability to think is the CPU; you have two kinds of memory storage: short-term memory is in RAM, and long-term memory is on the hard disk. Seen this way, you need to find ways to improve your memory and your memory capacity, because, as you also know, if the RAM is too small the machine slows down, or gets a blue screen, or even crashes. And your CPU frequency is not fixed either: as your memory capacity grows and your running time keeps extending, your ability to think will keep getting stronger, and so your ability to multitask will improve further.

In fact, spending time on mental activity is the most worthwhile thing. So-called mental activity can usually be roughly divided into these parts: inputting information (reading, observing), processing information (thinking), and outputting information (recording, writing, creating, sharing, teaching). In most cases, thinking tends to be a passive process (although people usually believe it ought to be an active process)—thinking needs stimulation, and the best stimulation is the constant input of information. So, when you are doing something mechanical—**there are many mechanical things in life that simply have to be done**—find a way to do some kind of input.

When you go out and ride in a car or on a bus, don't forget to prepare in advance a book you haven't yet had time to finish; if you happen to finish it quickly on the way (so perhaps you should prepare two books), find a way to observe the world around you; when there is nothing to look at, it's best if you haven't forgotten to bring paper and a pen, so you can also jot down a thought that has just flashed by. Although you can't always do two things at the same time, there are always some times when you can do two things at once that are both very meaningful.

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