[Duckapple]

I don't really like the emphasis on "wasting" time, the way he wrote it in the bathroom light automation section. If you do not enjoy tinkering with voice activation (or X thing in the general sense), then I can see why you wouldn't like losing time, but I would probably feel like it was 5 hours spent learning about home automation and voice control, which could maybe be applicable in other cases, both within home automation and outside of it. I don't see the 3 hours mentioned as "lost", but as time spent learning.

[rkangel]

Not all time can be considered equal. Let us say that one of my team spent two weeks building tooling that might save us a single day on two occasions. That might still be worth it if that day saved is part of some time pressured work.

You can think of this as the classic engineering 'latency vs throughput' tradeoff. We're spending a bit of throughput to get an improvement in latency.

[pradn]

Yes, work time and leisure time should be "graded" differently. Making your leisure time about being productive makes you an automaton. Just messing around is something we should cherish.