Video Gamer's Anonymous

This article questions the addictive properties of video games. It is a scary thought that relaxing for a little while in front of our video or computer game can actually turn into something some are now calling a disease. I’m going to take a leap and say that we all know that alcohol and drugs can easily turn into addictions. When you hear the word addiction what else comes to mind? Smoking, gambling, food, and caffeine are things that some people can’t get enough of or can't give up. Shopaholics, workaholics, sexaholics, and people with Bulimia are all slaves to something they want to be free from. But video games? It doesn’t contain nicotine but it can overwhelm your life just as bad as the worst cigarette addiction. As the article suggests, this is especially a problem with children. The younger generations are growing up in a world abounding with technology, especially video games. Because these are socially acceptable from a very early age, children are very susceptible to playing them in extremely excessive amounts and becoming addicted to them. Parents should limit the amount that children play, but it is an easy way to keep a child busy when more important things need to be done. Strict limitations should be imposed on children who are too young to know better. These habits that are developed early on carry through to later in life. Although not always severe, this addiction can lead to a reclusive and sedentary lifestyle, as well as causing a person to sacrifice important aspects of their real life to continue living in their video game world.  

The Smart Phone

We love entertainment. We hate doing things that don’t entertain or benefit us in the present or very foreseeable future. We are becoming so stuck in this mindset as a generation that we desire to be entertained at all times and never want to work. We know we have to, and we force ourselves when we can. Technology is now at a place where it can keep up with our desire to be entertained. The smart phone is a revolution in this area. 1G, 2G, 3G, 4! We can now expect Wi-Fi on our phones and enjoy the internet at our fingertips whenever we want it. We don’t have to text people in class or do crossword puzzles or pretend to be taking notes on our computers to be online anymore! We now have an excellent choice of listening to music, watching TV or movies, surfing the internet, internet games, online blogs, YouTube, etc. right in our pockets. We can now take our time wasting devices (I do begrudgingly add that that is not all they are used for. It is more our nature and lack of restraint that plagues us) with us wherever we go, just in case we have some time that we can spend immersed in our separate little world we carry around with us.



This article from CNN suggests the addiction to smartphones and technology in general. I do not hate technology. There are so many benefits and things that have made our lives and jobs easier through technology, but instead of using the time we saved through technology to become more efficient, we alternatively choose to waste the time in entertainment or mindless escape. We could accomplish so much more in life by breaking our cultural addiction to time-wasters. Life would not be better without technology, but life would be better if we learned self-control and discipline in our time management.

Making Up for Lost Time: Energy Drinks and All-Nighters

Final exams are just right around the corner, which means a lot of long nights ahead. While college students tend to do their share of procrastination and time wasting during any test period, finals are a time when all students have several tests (or papers) crammed into a very short period of time. Students hate tests, and they hate papers. You will rarely find a student who enjoys taking a test. We should be thrilled to prove what we know and what we have learned during our class sessions, right? Although this would be great in a perfect world, it is definitely not the case. College students dread exams and more so they dread the hours of studying they have to put in to do well on the exams. Many college students waste time during the year (see my previous blog on wasting time in the classroom) and have to catch up and learn all of the information the night (or if they are really on top of things, two or three nights) before the test. When you combine this with multiple tests in a day or in a short period of days, there is simply not enough time to learn a whole semester’s worth of wasted class time.

This article from the Battalion addresses this and comments on the problem that arises in procrastination and wasted time here in the College Station and Bryan area. Energy drinks and late nights. We try to force so much learning into such a short period of time. We risk and diminish our health by drinking way too much caffeine and getting little to no sleep because we are so apt to avoid the things that we dislike doing. It is a common joke that these are what get students through college. It would be nice to redo college knowing this to be a bad thing and be a good student who did his learning spread out throughout the semester instead of the night before each test. However, I really think that this is one of the important lessons that college teaches you, and it is important to go through process of learning this so that we can apply good habits to our lives.

Wasting Time in the Classroom

Although the maturity to age ratio of college students varies a great deal across the range of students currently enrolled here at A&M, most students are at the point in their lives where they are either in the process of learning responsibility or they have not learned it yet. This spills over into the classes that we attend throughout a given week. Personally I believe that attending a class and not paying attention is a waste of time, and I prefer to not do it if I know my mind will not come to class with me. Many students go to class mindless. They attend because it makes them feel better or because their teacher takes attendance and it is a big part of their grade, but they are not coming to learn or ready to absorb knowledge. During class they are not engaged or often even listening. I know because I’ve been there and because of the amount of people I see working on their Sudoku or crossword puzzle from the Battalion. I truly believe that this is a waste of time. Perhaps students occasionally absorb a subconscious thing or two from the sound waves passing by (but rarely allowed into) their ears, but more likely they are just trying to make time pass more quickly to get out of class and get back to life.

This article discussing a college in Nebraska describes some of the views of teachers on technology in the classroom. They value the potential that technology such as computers can offer, but the negative effects are not worth the benefit. Students can do in class research, calculate difficult math problems, or take notes on their computers. Students will be surfing the internet, checking facebook, playing calculator games, etc. Schools (and workplaces) design their web browsers to ban online games or time wasting sites like facebook, but students use an endless number of proxies to get around them. In the end, students will find a way to disengage their mind from what is going on in class unless the class is able to reach out to them and really become of interest. The problem should not be trying to stop or block every potential way to waste time in the classroom. This is the way that middle and high schools approach the problem, which is likely beneficial because the students have not matured enough to realize the value of learning. However much easier it is said than done, I believe that the effort should instead be focused on creating a learning environment that is interesting and engaging.

Hello Freshman Fifteen!

So getting down to it, what is the real problem with these time wasters? Yes, they encourage procrastination, make us late on deadlines, or prevent us from doing other things we should be doing, but do they have greater consequences? Video games and sitting around on a computer all day is a perfect example of Americans’ sedentary lifestyle. These time wasters are a big contribution to why we sit around much of our time, which is a big cause of the obesity problem here in the U.S. This article from WebMD News discusses how this problem is especially apparent in children. With kids turning to video games for their daily play times, their amount of exercise is decreasing dramatically. Kids may spend most of their day in front of a TV, computer, or a video game console. This problem also affects people of different age groups. Our culture is quickly turning more and more sedentary as we turn to doing most of our work on computers and also seeking much of our entertainment while inactive. Time wasters are a big part of this for a number of reasons.

First of all they take away from the time that we need to be sitting down working, usually on a computer. Instead of working, we turn to more entertaining games, online videos, and other time wasters that keep us sitting longer. Once we finally come to the point where we need to do the work we sat down to do, we must spend more time sitting down doing that. It simply adds onto the time that we spend unmoving. Also, for many people, these time wasters are addicting. Once we play or watch something for a little bit we want to keep playing or watching. These time wasters keep us mesmerized at our computers. Because we are drawn to continue sitting, we are more likely to snack and eat junk food.

Make Love, Not Warcraft
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This is likely very abundant in the lives of college students such as Texas A&M where I attend. Many college students are just learning responsibility and how to live their lives. They are at a point where they no longer have mommy and daddy telling them when they have to stop playing XBOX or when they need to get off the computer and go to bed. They have a newfound freedom and many use it to sit around and engage in whatever is the most entertaining and brings them the most fun. For many people this leads to sitting at home literally all day playing video games or watching TV, ordering pizza or making a quick trip to get fast food, and not getting up except to use the restroom. It is no wonder that kids first coming to college gain weight. Time wasters can be very dangerous if you have a lack of self-control. 

The Boss Button

March Madness is just around the corner. Basketball fans everywhere are preparing or have prepared their brackets and are saving up for pools and bets. Currently the conference championships are underway, with lower end teams (and their fans) hoping to get that automatic bid. What might surprise these people is the amount of time that will be wasted in businesses across the United States during this hectic time of the basketball season.

This article from Today News states that according to a recent study, about $2 billion is lost in productivity during March Madness. So what is keeping workers from getting things done? CBSSports and ESPN3 are only two of the many hundreds of websites that support streaming video coverage of sporting events. These will likely cater to the many employees stuck at work during the day while this tournament is at hand. Rather than miss their favorite team or a game of vital importance to their bracket, workers will watch the games on their computer while at work, listen to the radio through concealed headphones lining their jacket, and constantly check score updates through mobile phone internet connections.

As is typical when there is something more exciting happening in your life, everything else is in a way put on the back burner. This seems to be the case with the workplace during March Madness. It seems that many people in today’s workforce are not interested, engaged or challenged in their jobs. This isn’t necessarily true for all employees, but it is normal for the grunt workers and lower level staff of big businesses to scrape by day in and day out only giving the bare minimum to not get in trouble.

Perhaps this is a generalization but the point is that there are many people who would rather be escaping the drudgery of the workplace to live in the world of a multitude of entertaining basketball games (or anything else that can take their mind off of the doldrums that they are experiencing in the workplace).

Perhaps the most amusing thing about this MSNBC article is the idea of the Boss Button. I find this hilarious and so impactful to the meaning behind wasting time. The Boss Button is a button on the CBSSports’s website that is available when viewing their streaming video. When you’re boss comes near, you click on the Boss Button, and instantly a spreadsheet full of some random data appears on your screen in place of the game that you were watching. Although creative, functional, and in my opinion hilarious, this idea highlights the idea of doing something when you should be putting your effort into something else. People choose entertainment time and time again over the option to enhance their career or their life by giving the extra effort to get ahead. 

Is Wasted Time Really Wasted?

This magazine article from the Boston Globe brings up an important question: Is wasted time really wasted? At any moment in time you are doing something. People often say that they are not doing anything, but what they really mean is that they are not doing anything important. Sitting at my computer just now I tried to do nothing. I didn’t move, breathe, or think about anything. However, I was still sitting; I was in fact holding my breath; and by not thinking about anything, I was thinking to not think anything. Does this remind anyone of Ghostbusters?  It’s kind of like someone saying don’t think about pink elephants, and automatically a pink elephant jumps into your head.

It is easy to see that no matter how hard we try or don’t try, we are always in a state of being that proves we are doing something. And whatever it is we are doing has some sort of purpose. So we really have to look at what it is we are doing, and what we define waste to be.

So far we have assumed that wasting time is automatically a bad thing. In that we are assuming similarly to what Robin Abrahams brings up in her article that wasting time is doing something when we should or could be doing something more productive with our time.  However, are these things that we are doing instead of the things we should be doing benefitting us in some way? If so then I would say that we are not wasting time. I do agree that wasting time must be looked at in how a person approaches it. It is a relative relationship. If there is something we could be doing more efficient that would allow us to do more of the same thing in less time then something that we are doing is causing time to be wasted.

This is all very theoretical and philosophical, but the point is twofold. It is possible to do things in such a way that we can do more in less time. Also, if we do something that is less efficient, it is producing some other thing in our lives (whether that be fun, pleasure, rest, etc.) that is subtracting from the time and effort going to our goal. This article from the New York Times suggests that wasting time really depends on a person’s goal and what they want to do, should do, could do, etc.

This is similar to the law of conservation of mass stating that mass cannot be created or destroyed. When relating this to a person’s life, putting in time and effort produces intended results and unintended results, which we name waste. The amount of unintended results and intended results equals the amount of effort and time put in. 

A great personal example of this is when I was studying for an advanced calculus test yesterday. I put in hours of time reading my textbook, reviewing theorems, and memorizing postulates (time and effort). However after all of this I really do not feel that I came away with much knowledge or understanding of the material (intended results). A lot of the time that should have turned into understanding instead turned into frustration (unintended results). 

It may seem that when we put in our time and effort into something and we only get a small amount of our intended result, we have lost time and wasted effort. But these aren’t really lost or wasted; we just haven’t realized where they have gone.