Time Management and an Internet-based Culture by Yu-Han Chao
Right now I’m teaching Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, a still relevant book from 1985 which talks about how Americans don’t read anymore and are merely amusing themselves all the time with television and other forms of new media. Perhaps if you are reading this, you are not as guilty of being part of the bookless trend, but do you happen to be procrastinating online to avoid working on something else?
Time management has always been a concern for me. I have a great sense of what I term “Chinese time guilt,” since growing up in a Chinese/Taiwanese family, my mother always yelled at me if she suspected I was wasting time. Wasting time was watching television, reading non-academic books, or sitting around and staring into space. As an adult, I still waste time, but I feel plenty guilty about it. I procrastinate by reading every single blog posted by every single blogger I’m following online, checking Google news to see if anything exciting happened (usually yes), checking my Hulu.com queue to see if any of my favorite shows have new episodes available (we have no cable, thank God), checking the status of my Facebook games, and checking all three of my email accounts. Then, after I’ve finally run out of checking to do and made sure the fish, the cat and I are all fed, I feel horribly guilty and try to get back to writing, grading papers, or housework.
In this day of fascinating television shows and high speed internet, many of us have a whole lot of murdered time to feel guilty about. I like to think that every little decision about a small block of time makes a huge difference in our lives, however.
When I was still in my writing program, hugely depressed and lonely in the middle of Pennsylvania in the dead of winter, I decided to stay in and write one evening rather than go to a friend’s party. That night I wrote “Silence Manager,” my first short story ever published. If I had gone to that party, perhaps the circumstances under which I thought of and constructed that story would never have occurred, and I would not have that first published fiction piece that gave me hope and spurred me on, and maybe in the long run, I would have given up writing and submitting and…my life could have turned out entirely different.
The hardest part is getting past all the distractions and temptations and focusing on what really matters. Television and the internet hardly deserve our time as much as our goals and ambitions, so maybe for once, forgo all that online checking and open your Word document in progress already!
Yu-Han Chao is Poetry Editor at Rose & Thorn Journal. Her poetry book, We Grow Old, was published by the Backwaters Press. Visit her writing and artwork at her web site.
This is a great post. I feel guilty even reading it, hah. I just closed my blog, however, to give myself more time to write. It has helped immensely, and you state this very well on where our priorities should be.
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Hi Lady Glamis! Thanks for the comment, and I just closed my blog, too, for similar reasons!
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If there was no facebook, I'd probably be published already...
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Nice post. I'll go back to writing now *looks guilty*
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Oh my, but this is SO true. How the mind can seek out a thousand things to do other than work. Thanks for the reminder.
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I am into making
dissertation
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