It starts with corndogs. Yes, I still eat corndogs. And I like them!
Ahem, it starts with corndogs. There are two ways to prepare them. One is to put them in the microwave, zap for 45 seconds, roll them to their other side, and zap for another 45 seconds. The other is to preheat your oven to 350 degrees and then let them sit in there for 18 minutes.
I always microwave them, because by the time I’m hungry f0r a corndog, I sure don’t want to wait 20 minutes!
But a few weeks ago I did. It was largely an experiment to see if they tasted any better cooked in the oven vs. the microwave (they didn’t, but I swear that instant oatmeal mixed with water that’s been boiled is better than oatmeal mixed with cold water and zapped in the microwave), but in so doing I noticed something. 20 minutes is a solid block of time to accomplish something. So I took care of the laundry. I spent about as much time placing the corndogs in the oven as I would the microwave, but I didn’t wait idly by the microwave for a solid two minutes accomplishing nothing. I could have done the laundry after lunch, but in all it would have taken two minutes longer than necessary.
When is instant gratification really instant? High speed internet still requires time for a given page to load. Every time you do a google search, as fast as the search engine may be, you still click on the page and wait for it to load. How much time do you spend in a given day waiting idly for pages to load into your browser?
In the 90’s no one enjoyed television commercials, but we sat through them because the commercial breaks were short, and it was easier to wait idly and endure them because the time slot was too small to get anything productive done.
By slicing our time into finer and finer segments we stop paying attention. This is similar to micropayments for downloaded content in videogames. What’s $.99 for a cool feature that will make the game I paid $49.99 a little more enjoyable? But, just like the micropayments, that time is still being spent somehow. Imagine if you could take all of those little moments spent waiting over the course of a day and add them all together? How much time would that give you? 10 minutes? An hour? 3 hours? What could you do with that time if you had it all mushed together instead of sliced into a thousand page loads and seconds spent standing next to the microwave?
Instant gratification is never really instant. And without meaning to, we pay for a perceived convenience in lost productivity. How many days of your life have to spent staring at the spinning wheel on a youtube video as it loads the buffer before starting to play?
This is not to say that high speed internet is the enemy. Fast access to a swath of knowledge has the potential to make us more efficient. I’m mostly just trying to become more aware of what leeches away my free time without my knowing it. 10 minutes. That’s probably the minimum time block I need to get a small but productive project done. I think I can free up at least that from my current time wasters. The fastest solution may not be the best, if it results in a less productive use of your own time.
And now I’m hungry for corndogs again. Nuts.
