Make Time More Valuable

What is time?

Time is money; time is life. Time is years; time is youth. Time is a possibility; time is a chance, also hope.

We endow the value of time in the process of defining and interpreting it. It seems that it can be exchanged for many things. On the other hand, in the real world we perceive, time is detached, cannot be stored, accelerated or undone. The past is the past; the future is the future; the present is the present.

If that’s the case, the question that emerged before us is: How can we make time more valuable? Such questions like “How to improve the efficiency of time utilization?” and “How to maximize the value of limited time?” are also closely related to this one.

Let me share my own personal experience with you now.

Before going to university, my dear mother bought me a cheap but practical laptop. I liked it very much and used it as a productivity tool to write, program, and search for information. After a while, I found that switching back and forth between different tabs in the browser or different application interfaces was an inevitable but very inefficient operation. My solution was to arrange two applications horizontally in the window. This way, I could edit content in one application while viewing information in another. Unfortunately, not all interfaces took this into account. Some title bars were taller than expected, while other web pages contained a large number of images. All of these caused inconvenience to me.

After entering the workforce, I bought a desktop computer for myself. This way, I have two computers now. I use the laptop for searching for information and the desktop for content production. This improved efficiency and reduced actions that had no value for output once again.

But it didn’t solve all the matters. Whenever I go on a business trip, I can only bring my laptop and let the desktop computer “watch over the house”. I once thought it would be great if there was a USB-connected display that could turn my laptop into a multi-screen workstation! However, I didn’t know what this kind of display was called for a long time. Moreover, since this inconvenience was not insurmountable, I didn’t think of searching for possible products on e-commerce websites. It wasn’t until one day that I saw this product in a short video app by chance-this was exactly what I had been dreaming of! I called it “laptop expansion screen”. Even if the name is not very accurate, it can help me search for the corresponding product on the e-commerce website.

I didn’t buy it instantly. It stayed in my memory for a long time. I believe that it’s not too late to buy it when I really need it. I could receive it within three days at most.

From this story, we can easily find that reducing ineffective actions is one of the ways to make time more valuable. The previous article also shared many practical ways, such as: recording the thinking process to help increase valuable output; discovering productivity tools that fit your own habits; introducing the cost of time and labeling what we do as time value. In this article, we will also share new ways.

First of all, we should try to avoid low-level repetition as much as possible, and constantly iterate and upgrade in the process of doing something. Just like fighting monsters in a game, if the monster’s power remains unchanged, players won’t get any fun of the challenge at all. Instead, they will grow weary of the tediousness of repeated actions. For those simple but repetitive tasks, as long as we master the basic skills and can reproduce them, let the rest be left to machines, automation programs, large language models (LLM), and AI agents — let them handle the simple repetitive parts. We should focus our precious energy on the most creative endeavors.

In some cases, we may not be willing to overcome one difficulty after another. This might be due to the excessive frustration brought by past difficulties; or it could be related to our psychological mechanism of indulging the stimulation and pleasure brought by simple repetition, which is certain, reliable, and immediate positive feedback. Faced with the unknown and uncertainty, we may choose the known and certain.

So, why not stick a note on your desk that says: “Don’t repeat it; do creative things.”

Then, we can introduce the “abstraction layer” as a productivity tool. This term was coined by me. Its meaning is to mark things like floors, putting concrete things on the first layer, placing abstractions above concrete on the second layer, placing abstract abstractions on the third layer, and so on. With this tool, we can discover or mark the number of layers we are in, so that we can notice how long we have stayed on a certain layer without making cognitive progress or climbing to the above floor.

I believe that upgrading our cognition is a very important matter, but it is often overlooked by the general public. In China, the thinking habits of the vast majority of people are from phenomenon to phenomenon, from fact to fact, from emotion to emotion, rather than exploring its implications from them and extracting some essential and abstract things. Therefore, their cognition always stays at the level of naive philosophy and is difficult to break through. In fact, when we encounter situations such as “pressing the gourd down and the melon pops up” or “mountains appears as a peak when looking sideways and a ridge when looking horizontally”, we need to find a way to jump out the current level and reexamine from a higher level.

I believe each of you still remembers the concept of “set” in high school mathematics: the collection (or whole) of elements with common characteristics is a set. This is the process of abstracting from concreteness. If concrete things are at the first level, let the common characteristics of things be at the second level, and the scholars who regard “things” as “elements” and propose the concept of “set” are at the third level or more.

Although we do not fully understand these concepts in high school and choose to “settle for less” by memorizing them by rote. However, when we start working and need to make time more valuable in the process of problem-solving, we should achieve cognitive upgrading in the cycle of “from concrete to abstract”. Just like reading a monograph, if we immerse ourselves in the ocean of words, it is easy to get lost in it and lose control; but if we can infer the central idea of the monograph from fragments of words, then the studying will become relatively easy and the thinking will be clear.

Thirdly, we can create a grand vision for ourselves. This vision can be one or many challenging things we want to do. In our lives, it should take up as much space as a cover story or Special Feature in a magazine. This vision should originate from ourselves, rather than using others’ visions.

Take my own story as an example:

Since I set the vision of “crossing the boundaries of mountains and seas, the barriers among languages and cultures” at the beginning of my entrepreneurship, I thought of the multilingual mode at the very beginning, and then thought of multilingual writing and presentation. Finally, I decided to start my business with the 25 most widely used languages in the world. For most people, learning a language well is already difficult, let alone multiple languages. But for me, it is precisely because of such a vision and mission that I will find ways to overcome various specific problems in the multilingual mode and develop targeted productivity tools (specific details cannot be disclosed for the time being.)

It is precisely because of the multilingual mode that I can overcome the inherent thinking framework formed in a single language mode for a long time, and notice those common sense that native speakers can take for granted but almost unknown to non-native speakers. Therefore, such content has the potential for global dissemination without relying on the later modifications and corrections of native interpreters. This “one-time molding” method not only improves labor efficiency, but also improves text quality, making output more valuable within a period of time. Therefore, my time has become more valuable as well.

The article is almost over here. It took about an hour and a half. The first half hour was in the process of brewing; the remaining hour was for highly efficient text output.

Before ending this article, I asked the Large Language Model to write an article titled “Make Time More Valuable”.

You can try to ask to write one for you and see if it can bring you some new inspiration.