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Human beings waste an awful lot of time. Consider my process for writing this article: Begin writing, check email, make coffee, write some more, drink coffee, peruse Facebook, take a meaningless personality quiz (only to confirm what I already knew), tell myself I shouldn’t procrastinate, write more, check email again, respond to a non-pressing message, and finally, get up to make more coffee. Believe it or not, at some point I actually finished writing the thing.
人类把很多时间都浪费在了无谓的事情上。拿我写这篇文章的过程为例：我先是写下几个句子，然后收收电子邮件，泡杯咖啡，再写两句，喝口咖啡，然后上上Facebook，再做一个毫无意义的个性测试（只是为了确认一些我已经知道的事实），然后我告诉自己不能再拖延了，然后再一鼓作气写下两段，然后再收收邮件，回一两条无关紧要的消息，最后起身再泡一杯咖啡。不管你信不信，我最后居然还是写完了这篇文章。
I have plenty of guilt about my shameful time management skills, but I’m afraid that I may have also contributed to what Dan Ariely, the DukeUniversity professor and renowned behavioral economist, describes as his “marginal depression” about humans’ wasted potential.
我对自己糟糕的时间管理能力感到非常羞愧。杜克大学（Duke University）教授、知名行为经济学家丹o艾瑞里曾经把人类浪费时间的倾向称为“边缘抑郁症”，恐怕我就是患者之一。
“You think about the amount of human creativity and human ability to do good and the amount of progress we can make and you see what people end up doing,” Ariely told me in an interview last week. “They’re just kind of squandering their time in all sorts of terrible ways and not fulfilling their own happiness, not doing anything useful. The human stupidity really weighs on me. It’s like a depression—a marginal depression.”
艾瑞里在上周的一次采访中对我说：“我们不妨思考一下，人类有多少创意，有多少干正经事的能力，有多少进步的空间，再看看人们最后都在做什么。他们把大量的时间花在各种糟糕的事情上，而没有去追求自己的幸福，没有去做任何有用的事。人类的愚蠢的确让我很苦恼。它就像某种抑郁症——边缘抑郁症。”
Ariely, whose first book Predictably Irrational highlighted how painfully incompetent we are at making optimal financial decisions (and poked holes in the theory of supply and demand), has been researching human fallibility for years. (No wonder the guy is a little despondent.) But there is reason for a small, newfound source of hope. Along with Stanford University computer science professor Yoav Shoham and Jacob Bank, a Stanford doctoral candidate, Ariely has co-founded a company that aims to help people make better use of their most precious resource—time.
艾瑞里研究人类不靠谱的行为已经很多年了（难怪这哥们儿有点郁闷）。他的第一本书《怪诞行为学》（Predictably Irrational）揭示了我们在做最佳财务决策方面是多么的无能（并且该书还找到了供需理论的漏洞）。他的研究给治愈“拖延症”带来了一丝小小的希望。他与斯坦福大学（Stanford University）计算机科学教授约阿夫o肖汉姆和斯坦福大学博士研究生雅各布o班克一道，创办了一家公司，旨在让人们更好地利用他们最宝贵的资源——时间。
The trio’s first product is an application called Timeful, a name that their Mountain View, Calif-based company shares. At first glance, the iOS app seems like a slightly souped-up calendar tool: it automatically synchronizes with existing calendars and has a familiar interface. But the app also instructs users to pick from a list of health- and happiness-minded tasks—running, flossing, calling Mom or Dad—in addition to the usual personal or work-related to-do list. It then incorporates all of that data, which can include sleep patterns and designated productive times of the day, to suggest time slots for everything. “Figuring out what to do with your time is a really complex computational problem,” Ariely says.
这家公司的总部位于加州的山景城，它的第一款产品是一个名叫Timeful的应用，可以在iOS平台上下载。第一眼看过去，Timeful有点像一个加强版的日历应用：它可以自动与你的现有日历同步，而且界面也和普通日历应用差不多。不过这款应用会要求用户列出一张与健康或幸福有关的任务清单，比如跑步、用牙线清洁牙齿、给父母打电话等等，此外也有与工作或生活有关的日常任务清单。此外它还包含了睡眠模式，并且你还可以指定一天的某个时间段为最有效率的时间。整合了以上所有信息之后，这款应用便会提供一份日程建议表，将一天的每件事安排得井井有条。艾瑞里表示：“要确定怎样合理安排你的时间，的确是个非常复杂的计算问题。”
Much to my relief, Ariely posits that we are pretty much all unable to take all factors into account when deciding what to do, and when. Faced with myriad big tasks and smaller to-do list items, plus the difficulty of estimating how long it will take us to complete something and which time of day we’re best able to focus, we often turn to the easiest task at hand: re-reading unanswered emails or updating one’s Facebook status.
让我颇感安慰的是，艾瑞里指出，人们在决定何时做什么事时，很少会把所有因素都考虑进去。人们一想到前头还有千头万绪的大事小情等着自己，往往就开始头痛。再加上我们经常搞不清干完某件事需要多长时间，也不知道自己在一天的几点到几点干事最专心，因此我们往往会先做手头上最简单的任务——再看一遍还没回复的电子邮件，或是更新一下Facebook。
Translation: We procrastinate. A lot.
换句话说：我们都是严重的拖延症患者。
Making matters worse is the fact that most of today’s digital calendars aren’t well-equipped to remind us of the kinds of things we typically do outside of work but could possibly do during work—like calling Mom and Dad, running, or even flossing. In other words, today’s calendar apps seem to lack the smarts or focus in providing a more holistic view of our day, incorporating both what we need to do (like writing an article) and what we should aspire to do (like go for a lunchtime run).
有些事情我们通常放在工作以外的时间做，但忽视了它们也有在工作时间做的可能，比如给父母打电话、跑步甚至是清洁牙齿。但是如今的大多数电子日历，并没有先进到能够见缝插针地替我们把这些事安排到工作时间里。换句话说，现有的电子日历应用依然不够智能，无法通盘考虑如何利用一整天的时间，无法把我们需要做的事情（比如写材料）和我们应该想要做的事情（比如利用午休时间跑步）结合起来。
“The calendar is great to represent meetings,” Ariely says. “But we want to achieve many more things in life than meetings.” And yet, when we see an open slot in our calendar, he says, we think we can fill it with yet another meeting.
艾瑞利也指出：“日历应用在提醒会议安排上表现得很好，但是除了会议之外，我们在生活中想要完成的事情还有很多。”可现在我们一看到日历上有空闲的时间，首先想到的就是再安排一个会议。
Teaching someone how to make better use of their time doesn’t seem to work—so if an app automatically finds time for you to do the things you need to, want to, and should do, you are more likely to actually get them done. Therein lies the behavioral science at work in Timeful, with a few technological twists to help facilitate it.
教别人如何更好地利用他们的时间是不管用的。如果一款应用可以自动为你安排时间，告诉你何时去做你需要做的事、想要做的事和应该做的事，那么你真正完成这些事的可能性就会更高，这就是Timeful背后的行为科学原理。当然，要真正实现这些功能，也离不开技术上的一些“绝活”。
“The system needs to capture all of the things that are vying for your time,” says Bank, who serves as the company’s chief executive. “And it needs to help you make time for them.” According to the company, Timeful’s scheduling suggestions are based on a so-called Intention Rank, an algorithm that uses machine learning to rank activities within time slots. Underneath it is a data model—Timeful calls it its “Intention Genome”—that breaks down intentions to basic components and classifies them.
该公司的首席执行官班克表示：“首先，系统需要捕捉所有占用我们时间的事情，然后它要帮你安排做这些事的时间。”据该公司表示，Timeful的日程安排主要是根据一种叫做“意向排名”的算法计算出来的，这种算法使用了机器学习技术来在时间空窗内安排活动。“意向排名”的基础是所谓的“意向基因”，它会把我们的意向分解成基本的元素并进行分类。
“With many [other] productivity tools, you work for the system rather than the system working for you,” says Shoham, who has co-founded (and sold) two previous startups. He adds that the Timeful calendar is just the first app for the company, which raised nearly $7 million in Series A funding earlier this year. Down the road, Timeful could integrate data from wearables and other information in order to make more informed suggestions to users.
公司的另一名创始人肖汉姆表示：“Timeful还包含了很多其它的效率工具，可以说是你为系统工作，而不是系统为你工作。”肖汉姆还表示，Timeful日历应用只是该公司开发的第一款应用。该公司今年年初刚从第一轮融资中筹集到700万美元。未来Timeful还可以整合可穿戴设备和其它渠道的数据，以便为用户提供更合理的建议。
Like any new productivity tool, there is a bit of a time-consuming learning curve with Timeful. The app doesn’t take long to set up, but it does take a while for the user to get used to having an interface that incorporates both a traditional calendar and a suggested list of tasks, some of which don’t have a clear beginning and end (such as laundry). The more information and preferences you feed the app—which, incidentally, takes more time—the better it will theoretically make suggestions tailored to you.
像其它效率工具一样，Timeful也有一条学习曲线，需要一定的时间才能得心应手地使用。这款应用安装起来并不麻烦，但是它既有传统电子日历的界面，又有一个系统建议的任务清单，有些任务并没有明确的开始和结束时间（比如洗衣服），用户要想适应这款应用还是要花些时间的。你为这款应用提供的信息和参数越多（这些需要花时间），理论上讲它为你建议的任务清单就更适合你的实际情况。
Here’s another downer: Timeful arrives in a category bursting with calendar and productivity apps. And really, who has time to evaluate them based on algorithmic superiority? We’re all too busy tackling much more important tasks—like which pizza topping most closely matches our personality.
艾瑞里短期内可能还难以从他的“边缘抑郁症”恢复过来，他表示：“一个人要想学会管理好自己的时间，本身就需要很长时间。”说这话时，声音中还带着一丝挫败感。（虽然凭借这款应用，艾瑞里可能成功地帮助人们解决了时间管理问题，但人性中的其他弱点仍然让他整夜忧思难眠。他喜欢指出，人类有44%的死亡是由糟糕的决策直接或间接导致的。）
Inexplicably, I got mushrooms—about the only food that I hate with a passion. I’m sure there’s good reason for it, but I’ve got another pot of coffee brewing, and I’m pretty sure I just saw another email come in.
另外还有一点也比较令人沮丧：Timeful所在的领域早已充斥了大量的日历和效率应用。说真的，谁有时间来比较它们的算法谁好谁坏呢？我们都忙着干更重要的事——比如在心理测试中研究在匹萨饼上放哪种食材更符合我们的性格。
