The other day, I had a clear, terrifying, basically unanswerable thought: What would I get done if I wasted no time? Was it possible to get work done easier, or get more of it done, if I didn’t fall down every Wiki hole? I had never behaved so efficiently on the internet, and I’d been online for 25 years, so was this even learnable?
I decided that it wasn’t, because the very work I do is a lot of peoples’ distraction. (Certainly this blog is. Thank you for watching me learn how to write a diary in 2021.) But the problem I’d had ever since the advent of streaming video was that I could be watching one of a billion things at any moment. Thinking hard about what was on my screen meant thinking that I could be watching something better, or reading something, or picking my guitar back up, or, or, or.
Is there some way to organize these thoughts? Let me try. What are the most useless ways I spend time? Easiest to rank them from most to least.
Re-watching any form of entertainment. Obvious. Nothing new getting absorbed, just whatever dopamine you get from seeing a familiar video. Every few months I remember a parody video from the age before legal gay marriage called “The Bible Says,” and every time I see it, it’s less funny. But then I come back.
Watching a short video for the first time. Great, I saw something new, smart use of oxygen. A “Red Letter Media” video feels almost like real entertainment; they’re discussing a movie, after all, so I learn something.
Watching or re-watching an instructional video. Well, it’s learning, isn’t it? There are tiers within this tier; learning how to repair a toilet is more useful, and therefore less of a time-waster, than learning how to beat a “Dark Souls II” boss.
Watching a mediocre TV show for the first time. It’s TV. It’s what it is. There’s no series longer than 10 episodes that I feel compelled to watch from pilot to finale. It’s my understanding that many people do this and indeed spent most of the pandemic doing it?
Watching a middlebrow and/or bad movie. My friend Rich used to play a game called “Mixed Nuts,” a completely subjective exercise where people tried to come up with the names of movies everyone was aware of but nobody had seen. I will look back from my deathbed - hopefully it’s a bed - and regret watching, say, the 2019 direct-to-DVR Nicolas Cage vehicle “Primal.” But I watched it.
Watching a “good” TV show. My time feels less wasted if I’ve watched something I can discuss with the wider world. Therefore, time watching “The Great British Bake-Off” is less wasted than time watching, say, the evening news.
Watching a “good” movie. Paying for the Criterion Channel and using my library card to get Kanopy means access to a few thousand hours of art films that used to be scarce. This is my only revelation from the exercise: I think that the newest and shortest entertainment offers the least important use of time, while the old stuff vetted and chewed over by critics is the most important. There’s a strange bias here, one I didn’t realize I had, and I guess that’s what a challenge to write for nearly nobody once a day can reveal.
I'd probably get a lot better at Italian and Mandarin if I wasn't being a news junkie and reading your stuff (no complaints, love reading your insights). I translate Russian marketing copy and UI text for 8-10 hours a day from clients around the world every weekday (I'm trying to keep weekends off limits), and I choose to distract myself by seeing how the Dems are screwing up their latest moment in the spotlight and the nation's going to pot? Takes away from reading for fun
I usually feel as though if I'm not learning something or making something that I am somehow wasting time, but I also know that my brain needs downtime. I have friends who binge-watch whole-ass shows and I do not know how they find the time, but maybe I'm just neurotic. I write software and doing mindless activities, like washing dishes, is often helpful in letting my brain relax so ideas on how to solve software problems can float up.