Reverb10 / Dec 2 / Writing

What do you do each day that doesn’t contribute to your writing — and can you eliminate it?

Writing?  Like blog writing?  ‘Cause I’m not a writer and my blog is just for fun.  So I’m gonna turn this one into “what do you do each day that doesn’t contribute to your life?”

There are 2 activities that I fall into mindlessly on a regular basis that suck up a lot of time — watching TV and catching up with my Google Reader feeds/surfing the internet.  It’s not a productive use of my time.  I don’t really like saying “it’s not productive” because that implies that I feel a need to be productive all the time, and I don’t.  I fully recognize the value of being a couch potato from time to time.  And some evenings I really just WANT to be a couch potato.  But more often, I come home with something on my mind that I want to do — whether it’s work on a project, read a book, run an errand, do something crafty — and the next thing I know?  It’s 10:30, the whole night has passed, I haven’t really done anything and I’m frustrated at wasting an evening.

The thing is, I don’t want to eliminate TV or the internet entirely.  There are shows and blogs that I look forward to watching and reading.  But I do want to eliminate the “mindless” aspect of it.  Instead of watching whatever happens to be on, I want to get in the habit of watching the specific show I like or that I recorded and then move on to something else.  Instead of skimming through hundreds of blog posts, not even looking at a lot of them except to make sure they get marked as “read,” I want to pare it down to only the posts I’m truly interested in.

I think what I’m really getting at is that my current signal-to-noise ratio is too low.  Too much noise, not enough signal.  Too much quantity, not enough quality.

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This month, I’m participating in Reverb10, which charges you to “reflect on your year and manifest what’s next.”  There’s a different prompt every day.