Write Again Soon

I was reading my RSS feed yesterday, in between bites of chocolate tahini bread (so good with a schmear of almond butter!), and came across this blog entry called 3 Pieces of Advice I’d Give My 18 Year-Old Self If I Could, via my very wise friend Amy.

One of the pieces of advice is to spend your time and money on things that make your life better, rather than things that make you feel good. The author looks back at his younger self and comes to this conclusion:

If I could have back all of the thousands of hours I spent playing video games alone, I could have learned several languages, built several businesses, saved a fortune, become a killer guitar player, and built the body of a Roman demigod.

Lesson: Always try to get a decent return on investment for your time. Use your time and money to build assets and leverage in your life, not just to get to the next bit of time.

It’s true that I do play a fair amount of video games – for the last six weeks, Bill and I have made a habit of playing an hour or so of Super Mario Bros most nights on our Wii.  But for me, that’s an investment in our marriage, since it’s the one time in the evenings that we sit side-by-side on the couch and actually do something together.  After that, he goes back to working on his computer and I go back to working on my computer, and the hours elapse until we collapse into bed exhausted and fairly humming with work-related thoughts.

So I’m cool with the video games.  But what I realized is that I waste a good half hour each day looking at celebrity gossip sites.  People, TMZ, Dlisted – they started as a fun break in my 18-hour days.  Something I could quickly peruse while on a boring conference call, or while I had 10 minutes between meetings.  But then I started looking at them first thing in the morning – right alongside checking out Washingtonpost.com and CNN.  Yes, dear reader, learning about Rielle Hunter’s cheeky GQ photoshoot has now become as important as keeping up on the Israel-Palestinian peace talks (or lack thereof).  And damn if I don’t check those gossip sites before I go to bed too—just to see if anything interesting has changed in the land of Brad and Angie.

Yup.  In the time that I’ve spend keeping up with celebrity gossip, I probably could have become fluent in at least ONE language, read a dozen (very large) books, gone for a daily walk, and trained my puppies to be model citizens. 

So yesterday I went cold turkey.  I eliminated the gossip sites from my Chrome browser, so they no longer pop up when I open a new tab.  I tried to block them, but couldn’t easily find a way to do that – so I’ll be going on willpower alone.  Now just 18 hours into the experiment, I’m already suffering withdrawal – how will I know the seedy backstory and rumor mill about Kate Winslet’s newly announced separation?!

There is no larger point here – just that I’m trying to be a better person.  To get a better return on my investment for my time.  Maybe today I’ll go for that walk.  Or at least brush up on my Mario Bros so that I can soundly beat Bill the next time we play.