How many times do you load sites like Slashdot, Netscape, Digg, and others during the day? Do you find all of the links colored a:visited? Do you wish they'd age-out quicker so you'd have more sites to visit and discuss, and to forward to peers and friends?
How many blogs do you read? How many RSS feeds do you subscribe to?
How much time do you spend browsing through Wikipedia entries?
How many futile online debates do you participate in (Microsoft versus Linux. Liberal versus Conservative. Pro- versus Anti-. Debates where nothing will ever be resolved, and no positions will ever be changed. No, seriously, no matter how convincing you think you are, and how enlightened the forum is, it is extraordinarily unlikely that you're ever going to change a single mind, much less the world).
How many facile blog entries are you wasting your time authoring, tickling the reader's ego by telling them that they surely must be among the cream of the crop reading such an enlightened entry (which should offend readers who can detect the obvious pandering, yet it's a tactic that is becoming common), desperately hoping that you'll get atop some momentary meme list, your 5-minutes of fame yielding nothing of real Earthly consequence?
How much time are you spending on all of the above in an average day?
Take a moment and answer honestly. Feel free to answer in the comments if you'd like, though this isn't meant to be a competition.
For many people the answer might be "very little or none at all" , but for quite a few I suspect the answer will lie somewhere between "a hella' lot" and "all day".
What are you gaining from that sunk time? Entertainment? Intellectual stimulation? An enlightened perspective? Work-related information (that's was my personal justification back when Slashdot was much more technology focused, and the discussions actually did expose me to new information about the industry and technologies, though at the time the turnover of stories was so low that a single short visit a day was sufficient)? Are you gathering some nebulous site-specific karma that's more of a badge of excessive free time, or on some sites a perspective that most correlates with the group think, than wizardly knowledge?
Most of the time the net benefit of a day spent on the meme sites is nothing more than entertainment, but few would admit to themselves that it was akin to watching an all-day episode of Survivor or Heroes.
What could you have achieved in that time?
Could you have spent that 3 hours building a Reddit clone (to waste someone else's time)? Launching your eTailoring venture? Learning Japanese? Learning Python? Taking up a new language? Implemented that awesome new piece of functionality? Gone to the gym and started the journey to fitness? Cooked an amazing, exotic meal?
Talking to and observing peers in the industry, I've noticed that this time suckage has become a widespread, massive squandering of opportunities, with so many talented developers, designers, and intellects basically wasting their days away. From a personal perspective, I know that occasionally I find myself "quickly" checking to see if there is anything on the feed sites before delving into a difficult problem, and some time later realizing that I'd completely burned away all of the personal project time that I had set aside.
It's for this reason that I'd previously talked about router blocks and Firefox rationing.
Honestly monitor where your time is going, and if you're being the best you that you can be.
Aside: Many will wonder if the "facile blog entries" bit was self-referential. These blog entries once served a commercial purpose -- yes, they were entirely selfish, as most human efforts are -- but as the associated ventures turned out to not need the publicity, and I no longer was looking for cold consulting clients, that overt selfish motivation evaporated. I've never really been motivated by appearing on the meme sites, as a quick look at the "peers" in the space tells me that it isn't really a great accomplishment to be on the front page alongside a "PICUTRE OF KITTEN [AMAZING!]". Now I mostly do this as a brain exercise, keeping entries very short, infrequent, and quick to compose, saving my time for my attempts to Try To Take Over The World!
