Time Tradeoffs
Back from two weeks on leave from the office. I had a pile of books I wanted to read, websites to build, blog posts to write. But family and friends filled the time almost completely. This is not a particular bad thing, but!
I’ve spent much of today musing about the trade-offs we make to save us time. I’m hosting this blog on wordpress.com rather than self-hosting. Why? I’m choosing to focus on writing rather than keeping the server patched and up to date. I’m ceding some control over look/feel for example, in return for time saving. Blog software and other content management tools do the same, why self-host WordPress rather than building the site from scratch in PHP, Rails or Drupal or whatever? It’s quicker.
Elsewhere, I’ve been using Mac OS more and more. Why? Because I spend less time patching it with software updates, fixing things that break, and it starts up, shuts down, and goes in and out of sleep fast. The downside is that there’s less software available for it and much less legal hardware I can run it on. Sure I could grab a MSI netbook and put OS X on it, but to my mind that defeats the point. If I want to spend time tinkering I may as well run Linux on my main machine.
This applies right across many areas. Why do people buy music on iTunes? It’s not cheap compared to retailed CDs now. The music is lower quality and most has DRM that restricts what devices can play it back. However, iTunes is quick and easy to use. It’s faster than visiting a shop or waiting for a CD to arrive from Amazon. People trade off sound quality and freedom for speed and save time.
Why do people write so much about other trade-offs — money/quality/size/weight/battery/features — but not time?
