This is what I, Alex Winfield, look like on a typical Wednesday morning.
Whilst I do, admittedly, spend most of my days doing nothing, I do nothing in a rather more complicated and systematic way than I could.
Imagine for a moment that, whenever given the opportunity, I have a tendency to stay in bed all day doing nothing but reading and writing things on my laptop. I’m probably not even dressed *now*. That looks pretty lazy, right? For a lot of years I thought just the same, before I realised that I am afflicted by a far more complicated and sinister disorder. I’m not sure if it has a name. I’ve reached the point where I have so many blogs, sites, forums, youtube channels and email accounts to regularly check that it takes so long to “complete my rounds,” to patrol them for updates and to consume them, that by the time I have finished sufficient time has passed that I can plausibly check them all again. It is impossible, now, for me to “just check” the internet, for the activity of doing so expands like a pressurised gas, growing large enough to fill whichever gap of free time I release it into. My browsing has reached critical mass.
Less than one minute ago. So many updates, so little time!
Twitter informs me of both a new Cracked article that I must read – 9 Famous Movie Villans who were right all along, and that Ryan O’Connell has published an examination of Sophia Coppola’s career over at Thought Catalog. Both sound fantastic. By the time I’ve finished reading both bracketed numbers are appearing all the way across my tab bar. Facebook (3), Gmail (4) Tumblr (14) – this one is especially deadly – and there’s a Seananners video in my Youtube sub box before I can even get around to xkcd. By that point it’s gone 5pm which means because it’s a Wednesday that Zero Punctuation is probably updated, or else will be soon. Another week has gone by and I’ll I’ve accomplished is to not fall behind.
I love every second of it. And it’s that love, I suppose, is the reason why I’m getting into such a dangerous spot. The point that I was trying to make, of course, is that no lazy person could absorb data from so many contrasting sources with this degree of dedication. I’ve developed a streamlined and efficient system of circular browsing to impose order onto this constantly-updating mass of pictures and words; if that’s not time management, I don’t know what is.
Tumblr at its finest: