Wednesday, May 5, 2010

Wasting time - working (or playing?) around the day job

Some of us have less time to waste because of a day job - but guess what, we still have opportunites to wast those precious pockets of valuable time.
My friend Christine Lindsay openly admits to that, and more.
Christine Lindsay:Like most writers I have to work 9 to 5 to keep bacon on the table. So that means when I'm not working, the rest of my time is like gold. I have to squeeze every ounce out of the day in order to get the latest novel written. So . . . if only I wouldn't linger just a little too long with my third cup of tea in the morning, I might have written a page. But then, relaxing and gathering my thoughts for the day is good for me too, especially if that cup of tea is shared with the Lord.
Or when I am at my laptop, happily piecing together my latest scene and an email pops up, if I could only ignore it for a little while. But no. Like an addict, I open it and bang off a reply. Then another pops up and this one has an attachment that also begs to be read. I really ought to close my email for a few hours and do my correspondence all at once. After all, relationships are important, and email is my lifeline to a lot of people around this world.
But the biggest time waster---and truly the only one---is when I plan to watch TV in the evening. Instead of allowing myself a reasonable hour or occasionally two hours for a movie, I watch 3 hours. Now there's just no excuse for that whatsoever.

I know I can relate to the email issues - I'm bad for that. What did we do with ourselves before email? Or, who remembers what email was like when the only access was... dialup.... Oh, the pain.
But I sure share the time water of television. I don't have too many shows that hook me, but the bad part is when they are over, I should just get up and do something constructive instead of watching something I wouldn't have watched if I hadn't been sitting there.
My question/thought of the day is, since many of us struggle with television as being a time waster, what is ONE show or ONE pattern you can cut out, and maybe just give yourself an hour more a week. Just think 1 hour times 5 days a week and 52 weeks a year is... yeah, do the math, 10.8 days with no sleep. Or, if we count 8 hours a day sleeping, that's 16.2 days of just sleeping and watching television per year. Uh, that's longer than a 2 week vacation, doing nothing but watching televions.
The mind boggles.
In invite you to visit Christine Lindsay's website at www.christinelindsay.com

2 comments:

  1. I have lots of television programs I enjoy and they all come on at the same time, so I spend the next day catching up online. I actually look forward to rerun season. :-) Then I can watch DVDs on my time schedule. I also have a half dozen or so e-mail accounts. Gmail does a pretty good job of filtering spam, but I still get a lot of mail some of which requires detailed answers - crochet questions generally - and some research on my part. So no quick answers there.

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  2. I make excuses for myself for my one TV night. Love Castle, and it's about a writer, so it's actually research, right???

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