sw’as

It’s time for another no-TV stint, only this time the rules are slightly different.

Last year, inspired by a post on stevepavlina.com, I tried an experiment where I completely avoided watching TV for 30 days. I did that very successfully and as I noted back then when I was part way through, I was pretty happy with how it was going. I was pretty happy with how it went in the end.

Why

Last time I attempted this was because I felt the whole TV thing was sucking a whole bunch more time than it should have been and I’m doing it for basically the same reason this time. There is very little benefit to be had from watching most TV, and there’s probably actually a detrimental effect delivered by watching an amount of TV over a certain threshold or TV with a level of quality below a certain threshold. I think I’m breaking both thresholds on a regular basis at the moment.

The new rules

While last time I just made it a blanket ban on TV, this time I’m refining the rules a little to exclude some things from the ban. The purpose of refining the rules is to bring it closer to a set of rules that could be used at all times. Last year’s ban was never meant to be a permanent thing, and neither is this one, but I want to take it closer to something I think I’ll be happy maintaining over a much longer period of time.

Importantly, all commercial TV is included in the ban. This is important for a few reasons, but mainly because a 40 minute show will suck an hour from my life and I’d rather use that wasted 20 minutes for something a little more constructive.

The exclusions are:

• Movies which I haven’t seen before and I’ve gone to the trouble of buying, renting or downloading.
• TV series which I’ve gone to the trouble to buy (or borrow) on DVD. A strict one episode per evening will be enforced.

I’m also making a “no more than one hour of feed reading and subsequent pissing about per day” rule because the internet can waste a lot of time as well.

Let’s see how this goes.