The next habit I’m blogging through is “limiting media to four hours per week.” To gauge how I’m doing, I really need to give this some definition. The basic idea is to be much more intentional in how we engage media. For the sake of argument, I’m going to define media as “electronic media,” including TV, YouTube, web browsing, movies, podcasts, and music.
In some ways, I’m doing okay on this one. The only “active” TV watching that I generally do is Tottenham Hotspur Soccer. Several years ago, my youngest son and I began following Spurs. When I made this decision, I pretty much cut out actively following all other teams and sport. Soccer is great! A game is 90 minutes long, with maybe five minutes of stoppage time at the end. The clock doesn’t stop, so it doesn’t “lie.” It’s not the NBA, where it seems like it takes 30 minutes to play the last minute on the game clock.
But I have snuck other sports in through the back door. I tend to check ESPN more than once a day, and read the stories on the NFL, College Football, and Soccer, even though I know that this is a tremendous waste of time. The only other sites I check daily are Cartilage Free Captain, a Tottenham Hotspur supporter website, and Arts and Letters Daily. I do have a weakness for Lit Hub, but I don’t check it every day.
I listen to lots of podcasts. I’m a big fan of audio, but not visual. There’s nothing more pleasurable than well-curated audio, other than a good book.
Recent time traps have included browsing the Libby app for electronic library books, and the news app on my IPad. I removed it from my phone and I probably need to do the same on the IPad.
Passive TV watching is the other time trap. I usually read at night when my wife is watching TV. Lately though, I’ve found myself less engaged in reading and starting to engage in the TV shows.
Probably, the first step here is to track my media engagement. The next action after that would be to look at what I want to replace the media with, e.g., dinners and conversations with friends, board games, etc.
Half Baked 