Revisiting Time Sucks
I have been blogging twice a week for a very long time. I just pulled up an archive published on April 7, 2015, which must have been a Tuesday since it's titled, Tuesday's Top Ten: Time Sucks. I wanted to look back at how much my life has changed, thinking it was only a few years. Friends, it's been almost six.
10. The have to vs. the get to things: I still exercise daily, but I don't journal unless I have time after I write. Checking email is still important, but I break it up over lunch and after work. I don't check email during my two-hour nightly writing time.
9. Random television: We still have a television, but the only thing I watch with any regularity is the evening news. I've seen more than my share of Hoarders and Holmes on Homes, but I don't let television consume my life.
8. Google Plus: Google what now? Does that platform still exist? I moved everything from Blogger/Google years ago, and now it seems like a dream, not past reality.
7. Ello. Really? When the hell did I use Ello with any regularity? I no longer have that account, either. These were in the wrong order, imo.
6. Twitter. I still use Twitter to rage against the fascist machine that seemed to pop out of the woodwork between the original post and now. I also use it to talk to other writers, and to market my free books.
5. Tumblr. Um. No.
4. Facebook. The book of faces is my biggest time suck of these, but I'm spending less time there now than I was six years ago.
3. Yaoi Randomness. I watched Yuri on Ice over the holidays. That's the first anything close to yaoi/bl I've watched in well over five years.
2. Youtube. Wow. Other than the occasional Saturday Night Live video pushed to me, I don't watch Youtube much at all.
1. TVD (The Vampire Diaries). Well, applesauce penguin - I didn't see that coming. I am a completionist, so I completed TVD and Supernatural, but I wasn't happy about either of them, nor did I like the end of The Originals. Television disappoints me more often than it works out (Game of Thrones was a huge success in my book, but I'm one of the few). Sure, we binge the new seasons of Stranger Things and we're waiting for The Witcher season two, but other than that, I have zero desire to watch a show.
This would be a short list today:
5. The news. Who wants to spend almost an hour watching how depressing our collective lives are right now?
4. Exercise. I pair it with reading, so it's somewhat productive, but it's an hour I could be writing instead.
3. I spend some time on Slack and Discord, chatting with my friend groups. It's maybe twenty minutes a day, except for game nights - then it's five hours.
2. Facebook/Twitter - combining, because I spend very little time on either.
1. The day job. It's a necessary time suck, but it's the one that takes the most of my day, my energy, and my creativity.
It's only twice a week, but this blog is a time suck, too.
It's a black hole for posterity's sake, something I can review in ten years and say, "Oh, look at all these posts no one reads." If you clicked on the original post for the memes, not gonna lie, you were the first (this one was originally posted on Blogger - it has gotten zero hits since the move to Wix).
I think the ship has sailed on building a reading audience through blogs, unless you write non-fiction or you blog fiction. "Stay relevant," they said. "Post regularly," they said. Been there. Done that. Still don't know why.