[taylan]

I'm having hard time wrapping my head around the time-money analogy here. In the case of money, by investing it or delaying spending, you can have more of it in future. In the case of time this does not hold, because time is essentially a shrinking resource. You can't have more time in future by delaying spending or 'investing' it in the manner OP suggests.

Return on time, (ROT?), is always something other than time and thus measures of it are highly subjective. In the end, what you are spending is your life and although there might be preferable ways of doing it, I'd imagine that being the achievers they are, HN members usually err on the side of investing it. Actually PG's essay offers a nice exposition of spending time (having fun) vs investing it vs fake work:

http://www.paulgraham.com/selfindulgence.html

[webmaven]

Seems to me you can spend time now to save more time later. That isn't the only reason that time is 'invested', but neither are future financial returns the only reason people invest money.

And that's leaving aside entirely the idea that time == money (ie. you can often substitute one for the other, or invest one to later gain the other).

[VexXtreme]

> Return on time, (ROT?), is always something other than time

Unless you are doing something to prolong your life (eating healthy, working on an anti-aging cure etc). I don't think the analogy is that bad.