Where Did Saturday Go?

Where Did Saturday Go?It’s been exactly 1-month and 1-day since I last blogged. Where does all the time go? It’s mildly alarming to think time speeds up as we get older, though I’m not so sure how I feel about it —would that be a good thing or a bad thing?

I think about the last time I was completely immersed in some activity for a period of time, 100% focused in the moment—like during an intense workout at the gym—physically pushing my body to the limit. Squeezing out just one more repetition!
It’s a great feeling when you can block out all the competing distractions floating around in your world and just experience a good sweat. Sometimes I’ll look up at the clock at the end of a grueling weight workout and wonder how the time seemed to just zip by so fast.

Claudia Hammond, author of the book: Time Warped: Unlocking the mysteries of Time Perception, suggests if you want the weekend to go slowly (and who doesn’t?!), don’t spend time loafing around on the couch watching TV. Instead go outside and fill your day with new experiences and by Sunday night you’ll look back and the weekend will seem long.

In my case the problem might be social media and, to a larger extent, a lot of time spent on the Web, but not really much television viewing. I’m finally up to date with Breaking Bad and Mad Men won’t be airing any new episodes until spring of 2013 so I’m game to start following another show soon as the winter months carry on.
Even with this void in my television viewing I feel like I’ve been spending less and less time with social media and more time with non-Web related things, despite the fact my Android phone seems to go with me everywhere. Twitter, in particular, sometimes feels like an insidious time-suck, conspiring to steal all my free time and distract me from getting important things done throughout the week —but I keep coming back to get my fix, like a drug addict.

Last week I read an interesting post on Adam Brault’s blog reflecting on why he quit Twitter for a month and how it completely changed his thinking about mostly everything. I’m sure a similar epiphany could be experienced by quitting Facebook, imgur, or what ever else turns your crank on the Web.

As an avid Twitter user for a little over 3-years now, I found Brault’s post strangely familiar in the sense that I’ve shared similar thoughts by recently questioning the amount of time I spend on so-called “social” networks.
Lately I feel like I’d rather spend more time exploring topics I find interesting written at length in full blog posts rather than relegate my thoughts to a few dozen or so 140-character blurbs people will probably regard as forgettable nonsense anyway. No really, Dolph Ziggler, your Tweets are absolutely riveting, that’s why I’m following you dude.

Over the past couple months I’ve gone down to just a few Tweets per week from several per day and probably less than 1-hour per week on Facebook. Overall I’m feeling a little less distracted by the relentless noise of the social Web as Christmas approaches, partially because I’m not constantly checking the endless stream of updates that seem to thwart the remaining fragments of my attention span.