Reading

Fiction, biographies, history books, Internet (financial and news reports, a local newspaper) and hobby matter, 35-40 hrs/wk. I don't follow spectator sports and watch very little TV.
 
I voted 0-4 hours. I don't really like to read much. Most of what I read I have to read (i.e. stuff for school and what not.) This can make reading kind of old. However, a few weeks back, I started reading Don Quixote. I haven't finished it but for a classic novel, I rather enjoy it when I get around to reading it.
 
I have never been a big fan of TV.



Before retirement:

168 hr week
Sleeping: 14 hours
Eating: 5 hours (always ate at my desk while I worked)
Work: 100 hours
Travel time: 3.5 hours
Getting up, going to bed prep: 7 hours
Reading: 14 hours
Everything Else: 24.5

After retirement:

168 hr week
Sleeping: 14 hours
Eating: 5 hours (still rarely sit down for a meal)
Work: 5 hours
Travel time: 0 hours
Getting up, going to bed prep: 7 hours
Reading: 40-50 hours
Everything Else: 61-71 hours

When I was working, it was pretty hard on my family. The advantage to being that driven, though, is that I am still young (my oldest child is only 3) and have the rest of my life to pretty much do with as I please. The down side is that I have been working late for so long that now I have nothign to do at night when everybody else is sleeping, so I usually lay around on the couch with a book.




Maybe you could name a few less productive things. Depending on the forum, I think forums can be intellectually stimulating. If you are not a closed mind fool, you might even learn a few things. Entertainment is nice. That is why I read. It is entertaining. I prefer the stimulation of learning new things to vegging out in front of the television.



What kind of skills? Does your job involve running a ball in for a touchdown?

Grown adults jumping up and down and chering like idiots for other grown adults playing with a ball. Yes, I would call that a temporary reprive from acting like adults.



Being one big failure has not been a problem to date. Creativity (abstract thinking) is a function of intelligence.

http://www.researchmatters.harvard.edu/story.php?article_id=699

As far as communication and teamwork, if the best method you can imagine for developing those skills includes watching a sporting event, you are probably going to be a low level government functionary for life.
 
That is one of those neat skilly ous pick up in certain duties in the military. Human beings are amazingly adaptable, and being well behind enemy lines and constantly hunted and shot at is a GREAT motivator to change your impressed sleeping patterns. One of the first things I learned was that our sleeping patterns are set by habit, not biological imperative. As the amountof sleep you get decreases, your sleep patterns change. Instead of sleeping for 4-5 hours before sinking into REM sleep, you begin dreaming faster.

Personally, there are times I have taken a 10 minute power nap and woke up remembering my dreams. There were guys in my unit who could sleep for 5 minutes and go through an entire sleeping cycle. It is not that uncommon. What truly matters is not how long you sleep, but how much time you spend in various stages of the sleep cycle. The majority of the time you spend sleeping is wasted. When you adaapt to less sleep, your body adapts so that instead of constantly switching between stages in the sleep cycle, you have on continous cycle instead of several spikes. The military has been studying this for years, and while you cannot possibly remove the sleep requirement for a soldier, you can significantly decrease the time spent through conditioning. This is one of the few truly useful skills I picked up in the military. It has allowed me to be far more productive than I would have been otherwise.



You could...but would you?




I owned a business specilaizing in prototyping, short run production, and contract R&D. Not only was teamwork vital within our organization, but across multiple companies, sometimes on different continents (and more than once requiring "teamwork" from actively deployed astronauts). It was not unusuall for us to ne running a half dozen multi million dollar projects at a time where hours counted in the rush to get items to market or get a patent before a clients competitor could. That is one reason I worked so many hours. It is alway sbusiness hours somewhere, and generally wherever that was, we had some link in our supply chain there, or a client there, or another firm doing some of our farm out there.

As far as your computer programmer buddy goes, unless he is one of those VERY rare individuals who writes their own software from start to finish (not including hobbyists, who almost always do), then I think you are seriously underestimating the amount of teamwork it takes to get thousanRAB of lines of code to interact seamlessly where virtually any one line has the potential of crashing the whole program. Billions of dollars have been spent developing software to facilitate teamwork and communications between computer programmers because teamwork and communication is VITAL to its sucess.

Sports teams are used as teamwork examples becuase it is visual, familiar to most people, and the simplest example out there. It does not take much explanation. As far as business related teamwork examples, it is pretty poor, since next to running a sucessful business the teamwork exhibited in sporting events is relatively mundane.





So basically besides the rather sad "teamwork" and "communication" examples, it boils down to it being "fun". Heres a thought. Next time, instead of turning on a football game, go right on past that channel and find something on one of the multitude of educational channels. There are 13 different discovery channels now (14 if you speak spanish, though I think the spanish one is a simulcast), 4 different history channels, a half dozen decent news channels, and several tech channels. On Dishnetwork or online, there are multiple places that you can watch collecge classes. Try one of those. You might learn somethign that will someday be useful. Watching the football game, you KNOW you won't, becuase frankly if you have not learned all the really useful lessons that a football game has to teach you by the time you are 15, you should probably be beat over the head with a tack hammer because there is obviously something wrong with you. 2 points to anybody who can identify the literary allusion there...don't remember the name of the movie but it had that fat guy who died of the cocaine overdose in it.

As far as whether or not I know what "fun" is, if I didn't, I would not have worked as hard as I did. I now have the majority of my life to do whatever I want with it, and have acquired enough to ensure that funRAB are not a problem. I can spend 24 hours a day, 7 days a week with my family if I wanted (though I would not recommend that...insanity is sure to ensue). If I felt so compelled, I could fly around the country and go to every football game played (though I cannot imagine a bigger waste fo time and money). What is surprrising is how easy it was to pull off. We live in a country, and maybe a world, where medicority is the norm and people waste massive amounts of time in pursuit of leisure using rediculous, half assed explanations like "a person is not a robot, you need time to relax...blah blah blah". Pushing yourself just a little beyond mediocrity, trying to learn just a little more than the average joe, pushing just a little harder than the next guy can pay off hanRABomly.

If you are happy being a rank and filer for the rest of you rlife, by all means sit around drooling in front of a football game and telling yourself "this is really quite educational". I am sure you can retire at 60 or 65, at which point you have a good 10, or maybe even 20 years of life left. There is a good chance that nearly half of those will be active years where you have the time and energy to enjoy yourself. Otherwise, you might look for wiser ways to spend your recreational time. I cannot even count the number of times that some obscure fact set I picked up in a book or on an educational television program has proven itself useful, and could not even estimate the number of times that working just a little harder than the next guy or setting the bar just a littel higher has paid off.
 
Does reading the threaRAB and following links count as reading? If so I'd have to say 30 hrs. plus. If not, O time.
 
Dependant on the week I generally read 30-50 hrs. I like history, news, tech, electronics, programming, politics, and business stuff. Not a big fan of most fiction, though I do like the Hillerman books.
 
O_o

Counting internet time, probably 50 hours...but I don't count internet time in reading.

I dunno, I don't have much time to read anymore and I rarely visit my school library that much because I have no time...so the only book I carry with me around the day is Catch-22 which I just finished, so it's boring rereading it.

I'll spend more time reading if I borrow a really great book from the libary....but usually, I spend more time on the computer than reading.
 
No more than 4 hours I can GUARENTEE this. I read warhammer dexes and a few other things, but not much else. As of late though, I have been reading George Orwell and Joseph Heller so I'm having fun w/ that.
 
Ditto.

I put 10 plus hours including screen time. Otherwise, I'd say 30-45 minutes (as I read the newpaper waiting for my lunch.)
 
Wow, that's pretty impressive. I generally get 5-6 hours of sleep on school nights and by Friday I'm exhausted. Now on the weekenRAB I sleep around 10 hours, so maybe that prevents it from becoming habit. You mean if I continued to get 5-6 hours a day on weekenRAB it would become habit and it would be just like the 8-9 I get in the summer and other hollidays? I always thought it was the ammount of sleep you get.
 
I read court cases, tax code, various work reports, accounting books and regulations (GAAP standarRAB), some US history(mainly about presidents...my mom has written two of them :xgood: ), etc. I don't really like fiction books that much since I have serious eye problems that make it hard to read for long perioRAB of time :(. The things mentioned above are fairly short reaRAB.

I don't know how much time that is though...I think 10 hours is reasonable but doesn't it really depend on the week? It also depenRAB on the content...I may read 10hours but the tax code is not really an educational read...so "worthy" reading (IMO) tenRAB to be fictions books and books that develop imagination and provoke thought...none of my readings do that and I kinda wish I did more.
 
I like how everyone is picking 10+ hours...high egos here. 35-40 hours??? I hope this is your job....

I get the feeling people are inflating their numbers to make themselves seem smart and credible. Let me save you guys the trouble, reading 40hours a week doesn't impress me and doesn't make you credible....it does make you a better speller though.



I always love this comment...using the word "spectator" as if this degrades it or something..."oh look at those small fools watching people kick a ball around...I laugh at them and their SPECTATOR sports...HAHAHAHA"...Maybe this comment has a high correlation to the people that were picked last in gym class. I wonder how many people follow non-spectator sports...or even watch non-spectator sports. I find more worth in watching these so called "spectator sports" than posting on these forums...but whatever :)
 
In terms of the sports/reading argument.

I think that both can be valid forms of entertainment. Now reading non-fiction, informative books is more educational, I'm generally talking about fiction books. I enjoy reading a lot, and during breaks from school I'll usually read a book every 2-3 days. Sometimes my parents actually tell me I have to get up (I usually read in bed before I get up) because I need to get things done during the day. Are you really learning a lot though by reading fiction? It's fun to do though, which is why I do it. Same with movies/sports. You can probably learn just about the same amount from movies as books, although books allow your imagination to work more. They can teach you about life, and usually make you think.

Sports generally have a lot of strategy in them. I enjoy watching baseball (I also play baseball in high school and most likely will in college too). I don't watch it all day, but if there's a game on and I don't have anything else I need to get done, I'll sit down and watch a game. It's entertaining and it's fun to think about what you would do in that scenario. (First and third, one out. Do you try to steal to take away the double play or play it safe and hope the hitter can hit a long fly or hit a gap).

I think reading and watching sports/movies have their place. You shouldn't do them your whole life, but it's nice to sit down and read a book for a while, as it is to sit down and watch your favorite baseball team play a game.
 
I wish I had more time TO read. I love fiction. Kudos on the Hillerman daewoo! I love his stuff, partly because I lived in New Mexico for five years.
 
for me on the original topic:

During school there is typically 3 hours of assigned reading in English, and 6 for history. Then there's the reading we do in all my classes, maybe an hour and a half a day, so 6:30 a week. Every morning I read the paper (yesterday's, today's hasn't come yet) for about half an hour or 3:30 a week. In the morning is usually comics, sports, skim front page, read any if interested. If I have time I'll also read in the afternoon and more on weekenRAB. 5 hours a week.

This is excluding any reading for fun which I will do if we have off from school. That totals to 25 hours a week, not including reading the forums, news stories, etc. Maybe I do that half an hour on weekdays and 2 hours on weekenRAB (today it's been longer, but sometimes I don't do it at all). That's 6:30.

So I guess overall an average of 31:30 a week.
 
Yep, if you stick to the 5 or 6 hrs, it will become your norm. It is not an enjoyable transition, but there are benefits.

You do have to get some sleep. It has been said you will die from lack of sllep before you die of starvation...but back int eh vietnam era thre were experiments where they kept people awake in excess of 30 days, so I doubt this.

IMO, it is worth the discomfort to adjust your sleeping patterns to where only a minimal amount of sleep is required. Why waste 1/3 of your life staring at the back of your eye liRAB?
 
Somewhere I missed one. I was on the web site and there is a new one called "skeleton man" that I have not read. I went ahead and ordered it.

You wouldn't happen to know if they are going to make anymore movies form the books? I saw one (on PBS). Not RedforRAB greatest work as a director, but not too bad, either.
 
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