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I spent two hours researching into alternative charging options for my laptop only to conclude that what I had was satisfactory. It felt like a bad waste of time. I'm curious how often everyone here encounters this sort of inefficient time use.
What happened: My laptop has a standard power brick. But lugging it around all the time has made me think of potentially lightening the load. I already carry a USB-C wall charger in my bag for phones and other accessories, though it's 60W, which is about half the wattage of my laptop charger. I therefore conducted a comprehensive research across blog articles, Reddit, YouTube reviews, ChatGPT, and laptop manufacturers in order to establish:
-Safety risks of using a charger with lower wattage -Refresher on watts vs volts vs amps, etc. -The current status of GaN chargers, the standard wattage for modern laptops, and how high of W I should go for future-proofing if I buy a new laptop in near future -The need to order 5A charging cords rather than the more common 3A for "fast charging", but the trade-off being the cord is slower for data transfers -Amazon product reviews & price history search -Some other relevant stuff I can't recall
In the end, I tested out my laptop with my existing USB-C charger, and while it's not beefy enough to charge during heavy use, it's more than fine charging while my laptop's off or slow down battery drain while in use. So I closed all the shopping and research tabs and went back to work.
It's not like I have 30 days left to live and every minute counted double. Still, I can't help feeling silly and want to admonish myself to try to be more thoughtful in the future, for instance by testing out my existing USB-C charger immediately after verifying that it's safe to use on laptops, something that takes like 5 minutes. I'm not really looking for words of affirmation from this community about how maybe I learned something or how everyone can use leisure. Instead, I'm curious--how many hours can you recall having wasted executing something thanks to bad planning/strategy, say in the last month?
I had a similar experience recently (as in like, yesterday) trying to get decent cycling shoes. The ones I purchased cold off the internet hurt my feet.
I probably invested 3-4 hours in internet research, another 2 hours calling various bicycle stores, measuring my feet, or trying on shoes, going back and forth on what to get to try and avoid the most expensive option that seemed the likeliest to work.
Ended up pulling the trigger by recognizing I need these things in and on my feet for at least a month prior to the event they're for anyway and got the expensive option I could have just started with.
Incredibly frustrating.
I have to say this was a rare outlier. Normally my stupid rabbit hole efforts are limited to around 2 hours.
I guess part of my motivation had been to discover some delightful solution that improves my life beyond my existing solution / baseline. The problem is delightful solutions are supposed to be uncommon for a well-functioning adult. So the one time that the 2 hour long research pays off handsomely reinforces a craving to invest in additional 2 hour long searches of another high, which inevitably disappoints the majority of the time.
In your case, I'd guess the high is the ability to find a cheap but excellent solution. The feeling of saving money thanks to resourcefulness is often intoxicating.
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I've started a "quick" project to apply some basic maintenance to my bike. Just enough to get it up to acceptable standards and out of its decline into neglect. In the process of changing the balding tyre for a new one I discovered one wheel is not only a little wobbly and malformed (whatever, lol) but also cracked. I'm not an expert but I assume that a cracked metal wheel is a significant hazard and demands replacement. So I started looking for a replacement. Long story short what I learnt is that bicycle standards are all over the place (apparently 1.75 and 1 3/4 aren't the same - who decided to cross the streams by decimalising imperial measurements anyway?!) and that the first cheap one I'd seen really was a suitable replacement and not the potential risk of a wasted purchase/return/repurchase I was worried it might be.
I don't know how many hours I've wasted (it was more than two), or whether they really count as wasted, but I know that a 1 day job won't approach being finished until next week when I finally collect the new wheel that I had no idea I needed to order. Such is the work of being a jack of all trades. I could have handed it to a bike mechanic, had it fixed the same day and eaten the bill but by that logic I could just take taxis everywhere.
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