Friday 27 July 2007

Time is scarce; therefore I am picky

My time is filling up. Apart from eating, sleeping and other "housekeeping" activities, there are uni classes, homework, revision and work. Upon completing these tasks I can move onto more leisurely activities. The problem is, by that stage I am usually left with insufficient time to do all the fun things I planned to do.

Let's use TV as an example. There are many TV shows I like watching. Altogether they roughly add up to 10 hours per week. I simply do not have 10 hours a week for TV, unless I give up all my web surfing, newspaper/book reading and even some optional studying. Therefore I began to reduce the number of shows I would watch, which means being picky about my TV consumption. As my workload increases, so does my pickiness.

So I stop watching every TV show or movie that comes my way, unless they are worthy of my time. I go through the newspaper much quicker than before because I skip the uninteresting columns, the biggest offender being reports about a little boy recovering from cancer in the Royal Children's Hospital: I care about the boy but I do not need to know all the details. The same applies to all web sites.

It turns out that consuming less isn't such a big loss, because I have retained those that mattered most to me. The ones I have dropped can be considered bloat of varying degrees. The result is that I have become more efficient at spending my leisure time.

Who would have thought quality leisure time requires careful planning (opposite of leisure), and that being picky is a good virtue?

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