by admin

10 Awesome Internet Time Sinks

When it comes to sucking up time, there’s nothing better than the internet. You can use it to do something productive, or in our case here on ‘Monday’ we like to use it to waste loads of time. Here are just a few places we like to go when we want to use up all of our free time, and by free time I mean all the time, since we here at ‘Monday’ tend to do as little work as possible.

I now present to you the 10 Awesome Internet Time Sinks:

Time Sink #1: Google. Yep you heard that right, Google, the vast World Wide Web search engine. Pick any subject you like and instantly you’ll have millions of links to your subject of choice. Want to know the mating habits of sperm whales? Whether that new ab-roller is worth paying 40 bucks for? What about how to build Minas Tirith out of match sticks? It’s all right at your finger tips. Like the old yellow pages ad used to say, “Let your fingers do the walking” or rather “Let your mouse do the clicking”.

Time Sink #2: Wikipedia. The all seeing all knowing, well at least until they find out that someone deliberately edited houses in ancient Greece to display frat-boy humor. Well nobody is perfect, and certainly not the editors at Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a sort of user edited encyclopedia. Since it is user edited it could very well be outright lies, however for the most part if you are looking for something specific it’s always a good place to start, and usually if the editors are honest enough they’ll link the specific info so you can read up more about the topic. One word of warning here though, at times you could be at risk for becoming productive because some of it is the truth. Wikipedia is one of those things that when you look up a topic, there’s usually tons more links to other topics in Wikipedia. I mean that think is a link-fest. You could spend forever searching there.

Time Sink #3: Youtube. Youtube is a video hosting site. You can make any video you care to upload (as long as it’s legal and doesn’t infringe on copyrights). It’s got a vast wealth of user created videos. My favorites are independent game developers’ game videos. I could just sit and watch people’s games forever. Want to see some music videos, or some cool special effects thing someone made in After Effects or a long play of your favorite console game, even old cartoons and instructional videos. This is the place to spend most of your time; I mean you could just spend hours and hours just clicking on different videos to watch.

Time Sink #4: Internet Archive. It’s an archive for old text files, computer programs, radio shows, old movies, public domain audio and even old websites. Is your favorite website gone? Then you can go to www.archive.org and look up and see if they have an old copy somewhere. Want to find some old public domain movies? The archive is the place to get them. If it’s old and legally obtainable it’s usually on the internet archive.

Time Sink #5: Stumbleupon. This is a bit different; it’s a ‘random’ website generator. Usually based on your interests. You sign up download a toolbar, and hit stumble whenever you want to go to a random website that has to do with some of the interests you marked down on your profile. If you like the site, you give it thumbs up by clicking the thumb pointing up. If you don’t like it you give it thumbs down by clicking the thumb point, you guessed it, down. There are a host of things you can do, you can be friends with people and see their interests, and you can favorite your favorite sites. The more a site is given thumbs up the more that site is put in front of people. This is a GREAT time waster.

Time Sink #6: Facebook. Facebook is a social networking site. Essentially you sign up add people as friends and then you can tell them what you’re doing via a status you update. You can also put photos to share with your friends, links, and best of all there are games. Since people compete with each other these are big time sinks for some people. Personally I don’t really use facebook all that much, but since people share lots of stuff on there and the games being social (many not in real-time but turn based so you can play with your Facebook friends), it’s considered an internet time sink. (I knew someone who played Mafia wars which is a mafia based game where you make hits on other gangsters and stuff, who when he went on vacation would have others play his game so he wouldn’t lose rank or stuff.)

Time Sink #7: Twitter. Another social networking site. Only this is more about status lines (like what you’re doing at the moment). It can be like a giant chat room even if it’s not strictly real-time (It is if you stay on it, however most people don’t necessarily do that, but some do and it makes it a time sink). People share links and photos there too. Basically you get other people to follow you which means when you say something the more followers you have the more hear you (sounds logical doesn’t it). It can be a great way to advertise your website or anything really provided people haven’t stopped following you.

Time Sink #8: Digg. This is what is known as a social book marking site. Basically you put up interesting links and get people to bookmark it through the Digg website (and/or toolbar). I don’t really know a lot about it because I don’t really use it. However I’ve heard great things about it (well not really but I mean I hear a lot of people use it and since it links to other articles it can be a time sink if one wants to use it as such).

Time Sink #9: Reddit. Another social book marking site. I don’t really know much about this either since I’ve only looked at it a few times, but every so often I get a link of a discussion on there. I know there are people that spend tons of time on it.

Time Sink #10: Online Comics. Personally I don’t read online comics but I have read a few in the past, let’s say Penny Arcade or Buttersafe. But on a day to day basis I don’t. Partly because it’s a time sink, and I’ve felt I’ve wasted my time. Of course that is the ‘Monday’ way, so I probably should do more of it.

Well there you have it 10 awesome internet time sinks.

Until ‘Monday’

by admin

Waste your time searching for personal development and self-help articles.

The web is full of articles on improving yourself, personal development and self-help. The trick is to make yourself think you want to do all of this stuff even though really you want to waste some time. It’s easier to say, “I was productive today because I was looking up articles on Time Management, and Overcoming Procrastination.” We don’t want to be actually productive more than we just want to say we do. I don’t know how many times I looked up articles on self-discipline only to have 50 articles of them and opening them on a new tab and just reading them one by one.

Even better yet read each and every comment and trackback that are on the more popular ones. Some of the more popular blog’s like the 4 Hour Work Week’s Tim Ferris have 300 or more comments and you can read until the cows come home. In fact the people who comment on these blogs actually tend to leave links to THEIR blogs where you can read some of their self-help articles and the comments on those, ad nauseum. Pick any self-help, personal development, self-improvement topic and have at it.

Here are some example topics: Self-improvement, self-help, personal development, time management, productivity, getting things done, sleep hacking, life hacking, weight loss, strength training, speed reading, goal setting, and so on. (See what I’m doing here, I’m actually wasting time and generating content by just repeating the same words over in a different sentence. This kind of regurgitation is actually beyond the scope of this article, however if you look for upcoming articles you can see examples of this.)

Try to read up on the top ten lists, those are always fun and the most easy to read. They can be in the form of “XX tips on “. Top-ten lists don’t necessarily mean exactly 10. Just Googling these topics can waste you some decent amount of time. Also try to comment if you can on a particular article, maybe you have something to say because you’re not busy actually doing stuff (we don’t want to do stuff here, we just want to talk a lot.) If you do this I guarantee you’ll waste hours and hours and hours. And isn’t that what we’re all here for?

Until ‘Monday’

by admin

The art of being lazy.

Whereas procrastination is the act of putting something off, laziness is the condition of not wanting to take action. Let’s face it; we don’t want to do work. We would rather just veg out in front of the TV. Laziness is a time-honored tradition, from the cave-man who just “didn’t feel like” making fire, to the husband/father who just wanted to sit on the couch and drink beer. Of course being lazy is easier said than done. Being lazy is an art, and great art takes practice.

A good place to start is by turning on the TV. Find a soap opera. Yes even if you are male, you need to find a soap opera. There’s nothing better for being lazy than watching your ‘stories’. I like sleeping because like procrastination you don’t even know it. When you wake up late from sleeping in you might as well do nothing for the rest of the day since it’s already dinner time. See that trash over there, let it pile up. I would suggest, however, that you tie up the garbage bag and get it ready to be taken out, then whenever you look at it you’ll think “I’ll do it later”. Plus the trash doesn’t stink as bad.

The best thing to remind you is to do it later, and when that time comes, think about it again. Laziness is the result of a failure to act on your obligations and goals. Don’t move around a lot, because getting moving might stop your laziness. Don’t break down larger projects into smaller tasks, sort of like what you’re not supposed to do for procrastination. A lot of things you use to procrastinate, you can also use to be lazy, like starting a project that’s so overwhelming you can’t think to do it.

Laziness is, therefore, the art of being passive when you know something should be done, because after all it can be done later right?

Until ‘Monday’