Would you go to the grocery and return half way because you lose interest midway?
Will you start a conversation with someone in person and stop in the middle for no reason, only to resume the conversation two days later?
Those behaviors don’t sound rational in real life, but that’s what we do on Internet all the time. We read emails without replying, we click on a link with intention to do something, only to be distracted to somewhere else and never finish it.
The problem with reading emails without replying, is that when you do reply, you need to read the email again. It’s a waste of time to read an email twice unless it’s super important. And the problem with clicking on a random link with out finishing the original task, is that the task will never be finished until you do it all over again.
We choose to do this kind of “false starts” online but not in real life, because compared to real life tasks/errands/chores, the price of abandoning a task halfway online is quite low, and we can pick it up very conveniently anytime anyway.
However, because we use Internet so frequently and we do false starts frequently enough that the accumulative wasted time is actually very high. I’ve never done any experiment on it, but just do a quick calculation based on email: if I have 10 emails everyday that needed reply, and I need 2 minutes to read each email, I will have 20 minutes wasted if I don’t reply them immediately, because if I reply later, I have to read the email AGAIN.
The distraction on Internet is huge, and if we don’t realize how much time false starts could waste, we will find our times slipping away without any ideas of how it happened. And a serious person as molly is pointing this out to herself and to you my dear blog reader.
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