Since the makers of those portable telephones slid in self-tracking software so we could all horrify ourselves with how much time we spend perfecting our Snapchat selfies, there’s been a slew of productivity and efficiency articles dedicated to expanding that practice outside the bounds and bezels of our futuristic communication devices.
“Journal obsessively,” they say.
“Plan your entire week in advance,” they advise.
“Spend a week noting down what you did every 60 seconds so you can learn where you’re wasting time,” they muse.
I did that one, and it turns out I’m wasting most of my time writing “Noted down what I did in the previous minute” over and over again. On the plus side, I’ll never muck up in class again after that epic set of lines.
Time is a powerful enemy, and you’re not going to defeat a creature of its stature with bullet journals or a depressing awareness of how often you open Instagram to practise pretending you don’t know how all those bikini babes wound up on your search page.
There’s only one way to draw your metaphorical Glock and waste time… and that’s to waste time. Waste it on garbage books about nonsense. Listen to meandering podcasts by amateurs at normal speed instead of the 2x-chipmunk rate advocated by people who’ve never thought to linger over the few pleasures life offers us. Go back and read the entirety of my back catalogue here. Spend an hour or so thinking about how tortured the “waste time” pun at the start of this paragraph was.
Make a commitment in 2019. You’ll succumb to your base urges and make a mess of time. Start by paying for an online course in product management, UX design or some other nonsense that you’ll download and complete maybe four per cent of. Blu-tack a laminated Eisenhower Matrix to the wall above your computer and write “Buy Post-It Notes” in the top left corner. See what borrowed wisdom Tim Ferriss is spouting on Twitter. Note down that you wasted a minute on Tim Ferriss’s Twitter feed.
Then order a case of beer through Tipple and time it to arrive just as the sun sets, turning the brilliant sky a thousand warm shades of another gloriously wasted day.
