[nydel]

> Time anxiety ... means that your well-being is determined to a large extent by the importance of the value you feel you are creating with your life.

As a hacker doing mostly odd jobs and remote volunteer work for not-for-profits, I'm often consumed by the idea of whether I'll be able to "put my name on the day" when the head hits the pillow.

I have had a regular 0900-1700 job before, and it was nice to have the external validation thing to fall back on, the time-card that proves you showed up at least, or the mere fact that you're holding the job etc.

> Define what “time well spent” means to you

This is a great piece of advice. One source of metrics I found helpful to abandon is educational mobile apps / web programs etc that involve any sort of gamification. For example, I wasn't enjoying learning Japanese during the times I was redoing a lesson I didn't need to redo simply in order to make the education app make a fanfare sound and tell me that I had achieved my "daily x out of x points" ... I think measuring in time spent and effort exerted is a lot healthier, even if its complete inability to be quantified can be extremely frustrating!