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Do less in more time!

We here at ‘Monday’ like to do as little work as possible, and to that end I’d like to present some advice on how to do less in more time. Slacking is an art form, especially when it comes to make it look like you’re not slacking. A famous quote goes something like “Keep slacking, but don’t ‘look’ like you’re trying to slack. I don’t know slack casual.” That’s whole point of this, do less work and spend more time doing it.

The Pareto principle (also known as the 80–20 rule) states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. Business-management consultant Joseph M. Juran suggested the principle and named it after Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who observed in 1906 that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population. So 80% of your work comes from 20% of your time. Now if you wanted to do more in less time, you’d probably focus on that 20%, but since we want to take more time and do less work, you need to figure out what takes 80% of your time, the stuff that doesn’t produce anything and focus on that. Focus on the 80% that doesn’t matter.

Parkinson’s Law is the adage first articulated by Cyril Northcote Parkinson as the first sentence of a humorous essay published in The Economist in 1955: Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. So what’s the obvious conclusion? Allow more time for completion. The more time you add the more time you work. Of course I don’t know if this means you work more because you have more time, or work less. Actually we don’t care if we work less, just get less accomplished so that works.

Don’t do work in low intense bursts. You would accomplish more if you time boxed or essentially spent less time and worked harder. We don’t like working harder, we like taking it easy. Spread tasks out that should be done in a few hours to cover a few days. You want to work on low energy so you don’t actually get anymore done. Work slavishly until you’re so tired you’re about to drop. Basically when we’re refreshed we can work more effectively, so try not to work effectively by wearing yourself out.

Remember big large overwhelming goals and don’t split it up. The larger the goal the longer it takes. This is actually contrary to being lazy, however, not getting anything accomplished is just as good of a goal is being lazy. Remember busywork is your friend. Use it. Don’t take breaks either. Focus on doing work and not finishing projects. Don’t ever delegate, because it might make you more productive, instead try to do everything yourself.

Finally Clutter. Live in a messy house, and a messy desk. Keeping clean takes time; it also motivates you when everything is in its place. Instead be disheveled, disorganized, and disordered. If you can’t find anything, you can’t get any work done right?

These are just a few of the tips. There are more that I may introduce in a later article. So in summary, focus on what doesn’t matter, allow yourself tons of time, big goals you can’t possibly finish, work a lot but try not to get much accomplished, don’t take breaks, add clutter to your life and you’ll soon be doing less in more time.

Until ‘Monday’

by admin

How to waste time for fun and profit

What does the word ‘waste‘ mean? Well we’re going to take the verb definition; it is an action word after all. Waste means to use or expend carelessly, extravagantly, or to no purpose. What is time? We’re going to use the noun definition but time is the indefinite continued progress of existence and events in the past, present, and future regarded as a whole. To put it a little more clearly, time is an arbitrary measurement of the passing of events. Put waste and time together and what do you get? Expending time carelessly or to no purpose. In other words doing stuff for no reason at all for a period of time.

Okay, we’re going to take that last part of the article title off. You don’t get any profit from wasting time. You can’t get your time back, and it won’t produce something useful. At ‘Monday’ this is our favorite past time. Who cares if you have bills to pay, or a loved one to pay attention to, all that matters if that you’re having fun doing nothing. Who cares if you have a presentation to make, let your boss worry about that. He’ll probably fire you, but who cares? You’re having fun. Who cares, it’s only your wedding. It’s only the funeral of the most beloved person in the state. We don’t care, we want to do nothing.

So now that we know what wasting time is, what are some ways we can waste time? Before we get to the most obvious way, I will mention the next most obvious way, which is the internet. I’m not going to get into how you can waste time on the internet because I plan on doing it in a future article entitled “Awesome internet time sinks” but rest assured, go to Google and you can start wasting time right this very minute (well at least wait until you read the whole article before tabbing into Google).

The first most obvious way that we’re getting to as the second on the list is of course the television. Here is something that hardly ever produces anything useful. Sure you have your painting shows and your cooking shows, but let’s face it do you ever paint or cook while watching one of these? Didn’t think so. Oh of course you’re going to say the news. Well you can at least trick yourself into thinking you’re being productive by being “up” on the news. Truth is the news is there for people who don’t want to get involved but would rather comment on society or whatever. Or maybe you just want to know what the weather will be like.

Another great way to waste time is coloring. You’re not learning any new significant art skills when coloring, and most likely you’re an adult reading this. As a child you would color and it might help you in some way, staying in the lines, keeping your brain fresh or whatever. As an adult you had to put away childish things. Well now I’m giving you permission to start playing with childish things again. Coloring is great. Along the lines of that is playing with toys. Go buy some transformers or GI Joe’s. Go ahead it’s okay, I won’t tell anyone you still play with dolls, er, I mean *action* figures.

Reading could be wasting time, if it’s fiction and you’re just reading for enjoyment. Don’t fall in the trap of thinking you’re wasting time by reading technical books or something that teaches you stuff, or biographies. To be sure, with those you are learning stuff. You want to choose books that don’t make you learn, and maybe don’t have any larger vocabulary than a fifth-grader. I’m not exactly advocating you read children’s books however if you follow the above children’s books might be fine. Just remember the point is not to be productive. I believe you can enjoy time wastes though.

I want to address one more that’s actually kind of iffy. That is video games. Sure they can be fun and sure they can’t really do much for your brain, especially if they contain mindless violence, however, they will assist your reflexes. Improve hand-eye coordination. With some motion controllers you can even exercise while playing games. They can also help you learn things. For the most part though video games are for entertainment purposes. So playing a game can be a time waste. Actually you might want to play a game that you don’t like because that could be considered more of a waste of time then something you enjoy.

Well I hope this has given you some ideas on how to waste your time, so until ‘Monday’ keep procrastinating!

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’