Disclaimer: The following is written by a Ph.D. student for a Ph.D. student, but a lot of it applies to other careers as well.

Things that Don’t Pay

• Writing HN comments
• Writing Reddit comments
• Tweeting
• Sending too many memes, interesting links, photos, etc. to group chats
• Discussing ideas with people who don’t understand it
• Discussing ideas with people who understand it but don’t care
• Allowing others to take your time by initiating a random conversation when you’d rather be left alone
• Doom-scrolling websites (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, HN, Reddit, YouTube, etc.)
• Correcting people online (technically it should be under “commenting” but I wrote it separately due to its importance.)
• Revealing your talents to the wrong people (those who show no appreciation of the work, don’t understand or like it, like it but that doesn’t make them like you more, etc.)
• Responding to all emails within 1-2 days
• Giving people the benefit of the doubt more than 3 times
• Co-authoring and cooperating with others on a project you can do by yourself
• Not doing the project you can do by yourself out of the fear that you may not be enough

More Technical

• Customizing tmux (I’ve done it before and it’s not worth it.)
• Customizing Neovim (I did it a lot but still came back to VSCode.)
• Tidying up the computer by cleaning unused files, cache, etc.