I often stay up late reading books. I am told this is called “Revenge Bedtime Procrastination”. Then I get up late and groggy, or early and under-slept.

When I was reading an excellent old English novel last night, it occurred to me: these little habits of “wasting time” are simultaneously totally harmless (in a vacuum), and potentially sometimes very consequential, in context.

I spend a lot of time thinking about what could have happened if what did happen didn't happen. And I have always felt a bit ripped off that we make trade-offs every moment of our lives, without knowing what we are trading off.

Predicting the future seems, by and large, futile. But if there's any part of the future that we might be able to predict, it's our own tomorrow morning.

So I have taken to trying to calculate, any time I am contemplating harmlessly wasting time or staying up late, not, would I be doing something important if I didn't do this (the answer is, usually, no), but, would I be doing something important when I end up doing the thing that I would otherwise do now.

Because it's the second and third order effects, as usual, where the consequence shows up.

If I stay up late reading, that might seem fine, if I have nothing to do the next morning. But if I have something to do early the morning after that, I will be tired, because I will be on a late schedule.

Or: if I read Hacker News for twenty minutes, that might seem fine, because I'm too tired to get any work done anyway. But slacking off isn't displacing work (which wouldn't have happened anyway, according to the narrator). It's displacing things like actually resting, and doing chores. And those things, if displaced, might in turn displace work at a time when work could have been done! In which case, in terms of causality, even though it seemed like it wasn't, reading Hacker News was a direct tradeoff against accomplishing the most important item on my todo list.

It is perhaps worth mentioning that I read until two AM last night. And I may have watched two episodes of Star Trek this afternoon, because I had a cold. So here I am, at 11:30 PM, having accomplished approximately nothing in the day other than planting fifteen scarlet runner bean starts, with silence all around me except for the dishwasher, reflecting on the wisdom of my choices.