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Talking Digital Drugs Part 1

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Who are you?

Most of these guys are friends from over on HackerNews, and the data skews accordingly.






All my tech friends are guys. Not much surprise there.







You're mostly all from English-speaking countries







Mostly you're in your mid-to-late twenties.
Just out of college and hitting the workforce








Incomes around 40K or so. Nice normal curve in there


What are your opinions on technology?

Not a lot of interesting data in the direct results of the likert responses (the "Strongly agree" questions), which is surprising. So no graphs. But you guys are tech mavens: you know a lot about the technology and the internet, and you keep learning more. You slightly disagree that playing electronic games was as much fun as it was five years ago, which makes sense, since you probably just got out of college. The statement people agreed most with? (Standard Deviation-wise) "I know a lot about technology". The types of statements you most often disagreed with each other on? (by 2 places on the scale) "i'm really excited about gadgets", "I wish I had better gadgets", and "I like playing electronic games" Seems like with gadgets and games, you're either for them or against them.

So what's the problem?

Note the wording here, because I think it is important: Number of hours a day you think you spend non-productively (Facebook gaming, WoW, randomly-surfing the web, chit-chatting, reading articles not directly-related to your goals for the day, arguing with people you will never meet and will never change their mind, looking at pictures or videos of things just to pass the time, creating and reading status updates and tweets that are silly, pointless, or trivial, etc)

This is not the hours you spend online. This is not the time you search for information that you find. This is the time that you self-report as being wasted. So please don't argue about how technology is great, you can find wonderful things on the net, etc. All of those things are true. This is simply what you think is unimportant. That can be different things for different folks, but the point is that, looking at your overall technology use, these are the parts you are not happy with.






Minimum hours lost per day







Minimum hours lost per week







Minimum lost income per month


Where's the money?

That last graph made me sit back and think -- what's up with this? Are there two (or three) segments of people? The income was such a nice curve, yet the lost money is not. Perhaps people are thinking that their time is worthless -- I might make 20K at the library, but the time I spent not at work has no value.

But you'd think that this opinion would hold evenly. Would it? This might explain the spike at the end of the graph -- at some point you realize that all of your time is equally valuable, while for a long time -- in your early-years, perhaps -- you think of "work" and "me" time.

So let's take the income numbers your provided and multiply by the hours you spend each month.






Calculated monthly loss based on income and hours


So there might be a bit of denial going on. Let's take the folks out who said the cost per month for their technology use is zero -- these are the guys who are saying "what problem?"

Average age: 28, give or take 6 years. Average income: 8!K give or take 55K -- so there is no average income. Average time reported lost per day: 3.4 hours give or take 3.4 hours -- so no average there either. Same with the weekly hours lost: 20 average with an STD of 21







Hours reported lost daily by the "what problem" people







Calculated monthly loss of income for the "no problem" guys


Denial -- it's not just a river in Egypt.

In part 2, I'll start looking at correlation between sets of data -- do people with more income report more time lost? Are they more sensitive to the time they spend? Are people who are more social less likely to report time lost with technology. There is some good stuff in there.

Also please keep telling folks about the poll -- the more numbers, the better.

Note: this is not a study or scientific survey. This is just people who feel like self-reporting. In addition, the sample size is very small, hence the reason I am asking you to help me keep pumping the link http://bit.ly/b7IAcv

1 Comment

They're not reporting a loss of income because they are unproductive in paid jobs. Regardless of whether or not they actually are productuve, they seem to be. Therefore, they keep their jobs, and continue their non-productive habits. Nice post though

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This page contains a single entry by DanielBMarkham published on July 29, 2010 12:10 PM.

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  • Nolan G: They're not reporting a loss of income because they are read more

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Recently I created a list of books that hackers recommend to each other -- what are the books super hackers use to help guide them form their own startups and make millions? hn-books might be a site you'd like to check out.
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