How do you decide what is worth your time?

Question

I am hoping to get some good advice from the experienced developers of stack overflow on how to best spend my time.

I always want to work on interesting things, but now and then the interesting things are not actually worth it... That is, they're trivial and probably not significant to the rest of the world. So I have begun to filter those out. Some other facets of the problem are:

How to recognize:

1. Whether a Programming Language is worth your time, is interesting, has value..
2. Whether a Framework is worth your time, ^^
3. Whether a Problem ^^

A concept, an operating system, a company... so on and so on.

Admittedly, the biggest part here is deciding to settle on a programming language to master. So far I've only got working knowledge of a few C, java, php, adding python to the list, but none are fully mastered (where mastered means a nuts-to-bolts knowledge of EVERYTHING, comparable to an early adopter's knowledge)

tl;dr What are some of the thought processes you employ when deciding whether to give a damn about something in programming?

Answer 1

Your question is a general one - how we humans make decisions.

Well, we don't quite know how. We just do.

nuts-to-bolts knowledge of EVERYTHING

That is almost never needed. You can accomplish very advanced and sophisticated things with just general knowledge plus in-depth understanding of specific things you need.

I believe one fantastic characteristic that sets software creation from any other professions apart, is that we don't need all-penetrating knowledge of all things out there. You simply learn what you need as-you-go, on-demand if you wish.

You can't design a car or a plane without wide knowledge of materials, engines, aerodynamics etc.

You can't perform a surgery without deep knowledge of human body and medicines.

But you can write great software with some fragmented knowledge of the things. You just leave what you don't need out. Surgeons and engineers don't have this luxury. We do.

A real mastery is not in the knowledge of things but knowing what things you'll need and where to find them when you'll need them.