We’ve all read them. They’re squished into every corner of the internet; a vast wealth of opinion, hearsay, and ‘bro-science’; Rants and raves, top ten lists, and tip repositories on every subject in the alphabet from A to Z. What am I talking about? That’s right web logs or “blogs” as the ‘intern3tz’ calls them. They waste peoples time to read and, more often as not, to write. That’s what we love about them here on ‘Monday’. Anything that can help you lead wasteful unproductive lives is what we love here. They tend to mask themselves as digital journalism, but don’t let that fool you. They’re around for one purpose and one purpose only: to make money. The only way they do that is if you waste your time to make them money. Here at ‘Monday’ we applaud activities such as this.
There are some people out there that really do state the truth and really do report the news on their blogs, but we don’t care about them. News and truth aren’t really virtues here on ‘Monday’. Not to say we don’t care about truth here, however, finding the truth entails real work, and journalistic integrity which we don’t have here at ‘Monday’. What I will show you here are ways in which you can waste your time writing blog posts to help others waste their time reading. We won’t go into setting up a blog, as that takes too much work and really I would rather be doing something else. You can probably find out how to start a blog by doing a search. (In fact searches will be explored in future articles as a fun way to waste time.)
First you need a topic. Pick a topic, any topic, or better yet, make up a topic. Part of the fun of blog posts, especially those designed to waste time, is being able to make stuff up. You could talk about the underground flora and fauna of Mars and you would be totally legitimate. We don’t know what’s underneath Mars surface (and what with NASA disbanded, we may never know thereby letting us say whatever the heck we want). We could write stories, that since we can’t get published because we’re not any good, we can self publish via a web log. Whatever topic you pick, make sure it’s not of use to anyone anywhere, or they may become productive with it, or at the very least, learn something, and that would never do.
Now that we have our topic, let’s start writing. I advocate two approaches but one must take care that one isn’t being productive about it, they each have their risks. The first one is just writing first and revising later. The risk as that you’ll actually revise it later. You don’t want to revise later because that is productive. Instead you want to just write without any facts or background to back it up. Of course you can also start searching for some background on what you just write to fix it later, but remember just that, later, you don’t want to fix it right away. You want to spend the time searching and then get sidetracked on the latest fashion or movie box office receipts.
The other approach is to make sure everything is perfect from the get go. Perfectionism is a GREAT way to waste time and be unproductive. In this case you might want to waste your time searching and getting sidetracked. Google several pages, open them in tabs, read them until it’s time to go to bed and maybe follow a tangent or two off of Wikipedia. Then when the next day rolls around you can try to be perfect and put every little thing you searched for in your post. Be sure to use long and drawn out explanations, so that we don’t have to do any real work either, just read your post until we realized it’s past dinner time. Make sure your grammar and spelling are exact, make sure it’s says everything you want to say and in exactly the way you want to say it.
Before you know it, your parents have grounded you, your spouse has put you on the couch for the night, and your boss will fire you. Follow this article and before you know it, you won’t have produced anything meaningful.
Until ‘Monday’