In one of the posts, I made a throwaway comment in the footnotes about how if Sundays invite internet time wasting, then perhaps the best way to avoid wasting time on Sundays is to stay away from the internet (TOA excepted, of course).
It might make a nice rule of thumb for time wasting. If there is a danger of the activity becoming a time waster, find a way to avoid starting (1).
Another approach is to schedule time wasters. I tend to waste time reading blogs and such (TOA excepted, of course). So, I restrict the time I do it during the six non-Sundays of the week. I did a similar thing with work email when I scheduled a block of time each day to answer the previous day's messages.
A final way to cut down on time wasted might involve keeping a simple log. Tracking motivates reducing time wasted to its lowest possible level. If I budget an hour to time wasting, I might never realize that I get just as much out of 'time wasting ' when I only throw away fifteen minutes.
1. These days, I don't eat snacks at home...
The reason I stopped buying snacks for my apartment resembles this thought pattern - I stopped when I admitted that I ate them much faster than I preferred to. Instead of buying snacks and struggling to control my eating, I opted to tackle the much easier problem of writing a better shopping list.
2. Is this another application of Parkinson's law?
It looks like time-wasting activity might simply expand to fill the calendar space allocated for time wasting. Directly from Wikipedia (aka, must be true)...
Originally, Parkinson's law is the adage that 'work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion', and the title of a book which made it well-known.I sometimes get very skeptical about these 'insights'. It's not a far cry from stating - the thing took as long as it did. But it is a convenient packaging for another idea I enjoy quoting - worrying about efficiency is relevant so long as there is scarcity.
