How Much of Your Time Would You Like To Be Wasted? (Minutes Challenge)

Consider this question seriously, what percentage of your life would you like to be wasted? Spent doing things that you will forget and regret the moment they are over, cast into the void and never to be reclaimed. Consider the opportunity cost, how much time would you like to spend not investing in yourself, not living life to the fullest and not making any progress. If you are a young person, as I am, these questions should be pressing to you. With your whole life ahead of your, how much of it would you like to lose?

It might seem like a ridiculous question, none of it obviously, right? It seems like that’s the only sensible answer unless you want to play all coy and twist words “is there really any such thing as wasted time?” - yes, obviously there is. There are things you do which you forget, which benefit you nothing or perhaps even harm you. I more fully complain about such activities here. But the question for this article is do we really live as we ought to answer this question? Today we don’t, and I can hardly blame us. The bread and circuses no longer have to be sought out, they find us. And once they find us they get us hooked using the same techniques that casinos do. On top of that everyone is doing it. If you are young then its very likely that one of your main methods of keeping in touch with people (Instagram) now has a highly addictive slop factory built in which everyone is on and constantly berating you with content from. As soon as you open one, its ever so easy to scroll to the next and the next and the next. Thankfully I don’t use Instagram but everything else is just as bad and the addictive tactics are the same. Many times I have caught myself refreshing the Youtube homepage (much in the same manner a slot machine addict pulls a lever again and again) hoping that some video would catch my eye. Upon finding something interesting I would click, only to realize I was watching some garbage about a video game that literally does not matter at all and click off after a minute or two, then I would repeat the cycle. I have done this for hours on end before, this is pure time wasting, this is the behavior of an addict - and everyone does it.

So how are we really answering this question in our actions? What percentage of your life is consuming slop versus doing the things that really matter to you in life, for me it was probably 60/40 in favor of wasting time. Some weeks and some days it could even be as high as 90/10 certainly some days have been all wasted! How is this possible? A rational person would never engage in things like this, stepping back from the cycle you often realize what an awful thing has just been committed, like any other vice, wasting time comes with a lot of regret. Regret and also jealousy, this is because we watch videos of people who are living the lives we wish we were “here’s my video on reading a thousand books in a year” “…doing a thousand push-ups” “…winning the world championship” etc, etc. This is awful and it has to stop, have I complained enough to sell you on the idea that the lives we are living might have something wrong with them.

I have always been painfully aware of my own time wasting habits, this is why this topic is so important to me. Recently I reached a boiling point - which has happened many times before - and decided to once again quit the biggest source of time wasting in my life: Youtube (more specifically the Youtube homepage and recommendations cycle.) This article is a companion to the journal I released on my other publication explaining why I wrote that and why I undertook the steps I did along with why you should too.

The concept is simple, I’m sure everyone has heard of the pomodoro timer method at this point. You set a time for twenty five minutes and during this time you are meant to remove distractions and work; this method SUCKS! Don’t get me wrong, if this works for you than great, use this method and be happy. If you only let 1/6 of your time on this earth go to waste than that’s better than most. Here’s my big issue with it: it reinforces the addiction (and you still waste 1/6 of your life.) By setting the relaxation of scrolling whatever feed you are addicted to as an award it makes it hard to actually quit and instead leaves you thinking about how bad you want to scroll, and when you get into that cycle the five minutes is never enough. It is just way too easy to bleed over your allotted time and gradually extend and extend your break periods. This is because you are engaging in an addictive mechanism for your reward. Obviously this doesn’t apply if you pomodoro with a novel or something that easy to put down as your break. In addition, going from 0 to 25 minutes can actually be very difficult for someone who hasn’t built up the necessary discipline to do so - like I hadn’t. So here’s my solution: which for simplicity’s sake I just called the minutes.

It is merely a progressive version of the pomodoro idea, start with a five minute break and then do five minutes of work, this should feel very easy because its a one to one ration. Once you do five minutes the next work period should be six, then seven, then eight, then ten etc,etc. You should increase at whatever pace feels manageable. Personally I increased exponentially because I felt like I could handle it, the point is constant progress, as long as you never decrease the method is perfect. But the goal should be to get to 16 hours, or a normal waking day at which point you have quit the time wasting activities that served as your “break” completely. I am writing this article after finishing my journey with this challenge these past couple days. It would have been impossible for me to sit down and write like this continuously prior to doing this, really its quite miraculous. It’s hard to believe how much I’ve improved in my discipline. I went from reading 30-40 pages a day and checking off most of my to do list -never completing it- to doing everything on my to do list and working through The Idiot for entertainment! That’s the beauty of this challenge, it will fix your brain into finding things that are good for you fun and exciting again. You won’t be able to read a literary novel if you could be scrolling reels just as you wont be able to eat a salad if there’s a big juicy burger on the table already (not the best analogy but you get the point.)

An important detail to mention about this challenge is 1. Have a to do list 2. Be happy doing anything but wasting time. Just sitting idle and thinking to yourself is more productive than consuming slop, this is because you are exercising your discipline muscles and working towards getting yourself into finding things that are good for you fun. Also quietly self reflecting (which will automatically happen if you are doing nothing) is beneficial in itself. But don’t worry about sitting around and doing nothing for extended periods of time, boredom is a very powerful force and once the most entertaining thing is no longer an option, your brain will quickly move down the list of available entertaining things. What’s good is that as long as you don’t have other addicting things than that which you are treating as your break periods, engaging in less entertaining time wasters will still be a net positive. For example I used Youtube as my break period, so I started scrolling SubStack as my secondary entertainment (this is not a total waste since reading stuff on substack can actually be informative and making connections on here will benefit me in the future.) But ultimately many of the articles I was reading (mainly from Rohan Ghostwind were a waste of my time - as in they were pure entertainment culture war slop1.) The point in saying all that is, even if your secondary entertainment is still sloppy, if it isn’t addictive then you will still be able to easily address pressing matters in your life. Reading Substack will never be so addicting that you’ll neglect school assignments or quality time with your family (at least I hope not.)

The goal is that whatever happens it will be a net positive, that’s another huge advantage of the minutes, whatever you do as long as you are not consuming addictive time wasting content it will be a win. So you can be totally at peace and not worried about getting things done because whatever you are doing it will be a win. Also you will likely be counting down to when you get to consume your next dose of slop in each interval, that’s fine, there’s a good reason I’m not recommending you go straight up cold turkey. It should be much easier this way. Just be happy knowing that as long as I stick out this timer by doing literally anything else I will have won. Literally anything else also includes going outside, taking a shower, going to class or whatever other normal life things you do. But if you are doing these things while in the minutes challenge you will be thinking of how nice it is that you found this activity to take up your time and run down your minutes instead of how people normally feel when sitting in class or exercising which is: when can I get back to my addictive slop. This challenge inverts the negative feelings surrounding time wasting behavior.

foul forgetfulness which destroys the heart’s stillness as water destroys fire. Therefore, monk, do not ‘sleep unto death’ (Ps. 13:3. LXX) because of your negligence;2

This article opened with some helpful considerations on why you should stop wasting your life but let me dive deeper in this section of the article as to why getting rid of distraction in your life is so important.

Taking out one highly distracting and addicting part of your life will help you eliminate others! If you are someone who wants to exercise more often but never seems to find the time then this challenge will very much help you, of course you always had the time in the first place. The issue was that there was always more addictive alternatives at your disposal. By eliminating the most addictive parts of your life you begin to activate and train watchfulness over your thoughts and self-control.

I am someone who wants to pray every night and morning. It’s a thousand times easier to pray and read the Bible coming off the heels of reading a novel then it is to put down Youtube shorts in favor of praying. All of these addictive time wasting things have a mind numbing quality to them. Making bad decisions and losing control of your emotions will become far easier when you are essentially an idle passenger in your body, scrolling and scrolling without control. This part is going to speak spiritually so if you aren’t Christian interpret this as you may - that’s not to say this isn’t a section that is brutally true. How do you expect to have the force of will to counter suggestions of vice when you aren’t in control of yourself? When for example you come upon the idea to gluttonously gorge yourself, how will you counter this thought if you are mid doomscroll; you won’t! You will be ruled by your cravings.

Be attentive to yourself, lest there arise in your heart a secret thing which is an iniquity’ (Deut. 15:9. LXX).

Monks of old understood all this very well, this is the reason why the aesthetic life was so wrapped up into serving God. You have to get yourself under complete control if you wish for your good will to dominate your weaker instincts. We are living in an age of men ruled by their most base instincts and it’s not because we are worse people, it’s simply because our discipline muscles are sapped through addictive slop. To actually be a human, to have control of your own actions and live according to what you want to do in life, you absolutely must cut out the slop. Take one step in the right direction and suddenly everything else will become easier, that’s the good news. But being tangled up in a web of vice, you have to slash at all the snares equally, targeting the most constricting first and then the next and then the next, but with each rope cut the easier it will be to cut the next for your maneuverability will have increased. So start with the minutes challenge and then soar to greater and greater heights. You may also want to repeat the challenge multiple times for different gradations of slop, once you have quit Tiktok and Reels, quit Youtube, then quit Substack notes, then quit fantasy novels (or don’t if you think they are a good use of your time.) But the point is to be conscious of what you are doing with your time and to waste 0% of your waking hours. Always being able to look back on your day and think “wow I got a lot done.” Build something for yourself, invest in your future, etc. These are more my personal goals but I think people could relate to them.

I liked to keep a diary along with doing this challenge, partly because it gave me a good excuse to waste five minutes at the start of each period. You don’t have to, but it might be useful if you are a similar type of person to me. I also wrote it so that I could show it to others and look back on it myself. You can use it as a general guide for your own challenge although I cannot stress enough that you should continuously ramp it up at a comfortable pace so that you are always improving and never back sliding, failure makes you want to quit. So make things a little challenging but very achievable for yourself. If you do end up following my advice and doing this challenge like I have and want to tag me in your own diary post that could be interesting. But the purpose of this post is more to share something I’ve been doing and that I view as imperative for other young men that want to change their lives and the world as I do. Ultimately I believe everyone ought to have a desire to live life to the fullest and to run from waste but of course some people won’t care.

Don’t waste your life, not even 1% of it, its something far too precious to waste. For some strange reason we are not born with total control of our actions and often have to really force ourselves into walking the righteous and narrow path. This is just one method that might help you gain some discipline, especially if you aren’t already experienced in that domain, I know it worked well for me.

This is kind of a strange article for this publication so don’t expect more like it, but I found that it looped in well with my post hating on slop. This provides a kind of solution for those who agree with me on that topic and might still find themselves unable to pull away from that pit of perdition.

Anyways, thanks for reading, let me know what you think of this strange article and your own methods of self-discipline.