I think in many cases it makes sense to use the prioritization you describe, but I have two concerns about it:
1) I think it’s possible that with collective action problems, it’s really easy to miscalculate the potential effects of your choice (and talking about your choice) has on the behavior of others, and therefore harder to estimate the true good the individual action produces (and the harm that explicitly discouraging mildly good but ineffective actions might cause).
2) I think it’s likely that “how much of a sacrifice” something is varies a lot, and could depend how many other people are doing the thing and how your community views the thing. So it might be worthwhile to have a community that encourages doing inconvenient things, because that makes it easier to do good things that are inconvenient (ultimately making them less inconvenient).
Finally, I’m also not sure I agree that all things can be directly converted into “time spent” and then directly compared. Yes, if I have a specific amount of time I spend on social media, where I can either advocate for policy change or individual action, I should use that time for policy change. But some kinds of time use are inelastic or not-exchangable at a certain point, and one-off uses of mental time for deciding how to spend that inelastic time in a positive way doesn’t seem wasteful to me. So I think it’s better to be more nuanced than just saying “everything takes time and so everything is a trade-off” and instead evaluate which things genuinely trade off time with each other.
I think in many cases it makes sense to use the prioritization you describe, but I have two concerns about it:
1) I think it’s possible that with collective action problems, it’s really easy to miscalculate the potential effects of your choice (and talking about your choice) has on the behavior of others, and therefore harder to estimate the true good the individual action produces (and the harm that explicitly discouraging mildly good but ineffective actions might cause).
2) I think it’s likely that “how much of a sacrifice” something is varies a lot, and could depend how many other people are doing the thing and how your community views the thing. So it might be worthwhile to have a community that encourages doing inconvenient things, because that makes it easier to do good things that are inconvenient (ultimately making them less inconvenient).
Finally, I’m also not sure I agree that all things can be directly converted into “time spent” and then directly compared. Yes, if I have a specific amount of time I spend on social media, where I can either advocate for policy change or individual action, I should use that time for policy change. But some kinds of time use are inelastic or not-exchangable at a certain point, and one-off uses of mental time for deciding how to spend that inelastic time in a positive way doesn’t seem wasteful to me. So I think it’s better to be more nuanced than just saying “everything takes time and so everything is a trade-off” and instead evaluate which things genuinely trade off time with each other.