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TsviBT comments on Open thread for December 9 - 16, 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion
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PSA: If you want to get store-bought food (as opposed to eating out all the time or eating Soylent), but you don't want to have to go shopping all the time, check to see if there is a grocery delivery service in your area. At least where I live, the delivery fee is far outbalanced by the benefit of almost no shopping time, slightly cheaper food, and decreased cognitive load (I can just copy my previous order, and tweak it as desired).
This makes me wonder: What are some simple ways to save quite some time that the average person does not think of?
Sleep enough.
Look at the boring advice repository
Move close to where you work (even if it means you have to live in a smaller place).
If you don't have a car, study in the bus/train or take the commute as a bicycling exercise if the distance is relatively short and you can take a shower.
Stop watching TV.
Possibly cooking very large meals and saving the rest. If you want to save money by cooking from scratch rather than buying prepared food or eating out, it can help to prepare several meals worth at a time.
Pay for an online assistant. It makes you feel awkward but I hear it's quite effective.
Dave Asprey claims that you can get by fine on five hours of sleep if you optimize it to spend as much time in REM and delta sleep as possible. This appeals to me more than polyphasic sleep does. Link
Also I was intrigued when xkcd mentioned the 28 hour day, but I don't know of anyone who has maintained that schedule
Dan Aspey claims he can do well on 5 hours of sleep, and then makes a further claim that any other adult (he recommends not trying to do serious sleep reduction until you're past 23) can also do well on 5 hours. To judge by a fast look at the comments, rather few of his readers are trying this, let alone succeeding at it.
Do you have any information about whether Aspey's results generalize?
I am under the impression that nearly anybody who talks about sleep is guilty of Generalizing from One Example.
Not really.
There are by now some quite extensive studies about the amount of required or healthy sleep. Sleep is roughly normal distributed between 5 and 9 hours and for some of those getting 5 or less hours of sleep this appears to be healthy:
Jane E. Ferrie, Martin J. Shipley, Francesco P. Cappuccio, Eric Brunner, Michelle A. Miller, Meena Kumari, Michael G. Marmot: A Prospective Study of Change in Sleep Duration: Associations with Mortality in the Whitehall II Cohort.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2276139/pdf/aasm.30.12.1659.pdf
So probably Dave Asprey is one of those 1% for this is correct.
Some improvements (or changes) may be possible for most of us though. You can get along with less sleep if you sleep at your optimum sleep time (which differs depending on your genes esp. the Period 3 gene) and if you start to sleep quickly.
Polyphasic sleep may significantly reduce your sleep total but nobody seems to be able what the health effects are. It might be that it risks your long time health.
Another benefit for me is reduced mistakes in picking items from the list.
Some people don't use online shopping because they worry pickers may make errors. My experience is that they do, but at a much lower rate than I do when I go myself. I frequently miss minor items off my list on the first circuit through the shop, and don't go back for it because it'd take too long to find. I am also influenced by in-store advertising, product arrangements, "special" offers and tiredness in to purchasing items that I would rather not. It's much easier to whip out a calculator to work out whether an offer really is better when you're sat calmly at your laptop than when you're exhausted towards the end of a long shopping trip.
You'd expect paid pickers to be better at it - they do it all their working hours, I only do it once or twice a month. Also, all the services I've used (in the UK) allow you to reject any mistaken items at your door for a full refund - which you can't do for your own mistakes. The errors pickers make are different to the ones I would, which makes them more salient - but they are no more inconvenient in impact on average.
Alternative: buy a freezer and buy your food in bulk.
My family does this and it's not such a good idea. Old forgotten food will accumulate at the bottom and you'll have less usable space at the top. Chucking out the old food is a) a trivial inconvenience and b) guilt-inducing.
Unless it's one of those freezers with sliding trays.
I have one of those. I thought the chest models are antiquity.
They are standard in the US. It's like washers: top-loaders dominate in the US and front-loaders dominate in Europe.
I disagree with this. Having lived in the US my entire life (specifically MA and VA), I've been in very few homes that had chest freezers, and as far as I recall, none that only had chest freezers (as opposed to extra storage beyond a combination refrigerator/freezer).
I'm not willing to pay to resolve this difference of perception, but if one wanted to do so, the information is probably available here.
I am not sure we disagree. I'm not saying that people are using chest freezers instead of normal refrigerators. I'm saying that if a family buys a separate freezer in addition to a regular fridge, in the US that separate freezer is likely to be a chest freezer.
Here on the West Coast I've seen both standing and chest models, although combination refrigerator/freezers are far more common than either. I associate the chest style with hunters and older people, but that likely reflects my upbringing; I wouldn't hazard a guess as to which is more common overall.
Assuming you are largely indifferent between fresh and frozen food (a data point: I'm not).
I find this a false dichotomy. Care to muster a rebuke?
Empiricism! :-)
Most of the food that I eat doesn't freeze or doesn't freeze well (think fruits and vegetables). Frozen meat is OK for a stew but not at all OK for steaks.
I find -- based on my personal experience -- the texture, aromas, etc. of fresh food to be quite superior to those of frozen food.
Ah, it's funny how easily I forget food isn't just about fueling your cells.
I was expecting some sort of a nutrition based argument.
I would point out that it's unwise to ignore one of the major sources of pleasure in this world :-)
I hear that if you stir-fry vegetables, then frozen is a better option. (I eat most of the vegetables I eat raw or dehydrated, neither of which seem to do well if you freeze them first.)
I think it depends on whether you can get your heat high enough.
The point of stir-frying frozen veggies is to brown the outside while not overcooking the inside. Normally this is done by cooking non-frozen veggies at very high heat but a regular house stove can't do it properly -- so a workaround is to use frozen.
How does freeze-them-yourself compare to buying vegetables which are already frozen?
The good kind of already frozen vegetables are much tastier, have better texture and have kept more of their nutrients. That is because an ordinary freezer is not nearly quick enough to preserve most vegetables.
Industrially-frozen food is frozen much faster which is good. A house freezer is not powerful (or cold) enough to freeze food sufficiently fast.
I hear that buying them already frozen is cheaper, more sanitary, and less work, but I haven't looked into it myself.
re: steaks, that's just not accurate. Frozen steaks are great! I say this as someone who filled his freezer with a quarter of a cow.
Maybe I just don't know how to deal with frozen steaks, but for me fresh-meat steaks are much, much juicier.
For those in the community living in the south Bay Area: https://www.google.com/shopping/express/
Regarding food in particular, I'm still wishing Romeo Stevens would commercialize his tasty and nutritious soylent alternative so I could buy it the same way I buy juice from the grocery store.