Experiments in Time Management: Turning Off The TV
I’ve spoken about the effects of neglecting your phone on your productivity before, but this week I’ve been practising ignoring another technological intrusion: the television. At the risk of sounding like a pearl-clutching commentator from the 1990s lamenting that TV is ‘desensitising the children’, I have to admit that it has desensitised me. But let me start somewhere at the beginning.
I am not someone who watches television as art. I have always had that ugly rebellious streak where I actively avoid anything popular, so I haven’t watched any of the big era-defining TV shows or streaming break outs (apart from a period where I binged Queer Eye about five years after everyone else). This is partly due to that rebellious streak, and partly because I’m afraid of the commitment. I don’t want to start something I might not finish, to have to commit many hours over many years of my life to completing something that I don’t care enough about in the first place. Another reason is that, apparently, I am too sensitive for TV drama. I spend days mourning characters of shows I’ve only read about; and on sleepless nights my brain likes to traumatise me with the crystal clear scenes of Jacobean execution I watched on a BBC drama three years ago.
I come from a family where the television was the centre of the home. It was one of the constants of daily life that you get home and put the telly on, and then you don’t turn it off until you go to bed. I would come home from school and have the kids television programming on from Mona the Vampire through to Blue Peter, and when my dad came home we turn over for the news and weather, and then watch whatever came after it, usually while complaining that there was nothing on, until the news and the weather came on again and everyone went to bed. Our meals were consumed to the tune of the television, my homework distracted by it, our conversations happened above and around it.
I tell you this potted history because it shows what television as always been – a constant default. Not something you pay a lot of attention to, not something you invest in, but something that is omnipresent, that is there whether you like it or not, that is unquestionably in throughout your waking, non-working hours. This is a routine I’ve stuck with in my adult life, too. Funnily enough, in all my years self-employed I can think of maybe one or two days where I turned the TV on before the end of the work day, I have never succumbed to a daytime TV habit (in fact, I would record and save any daytime shows I wanted to watch for the evening). I realise now, writing this, that the turning on of the television is an almost Pavlovian response in me that now it is time to stop working. And it always goes on in the evenings because what else do you do but watch TV, even though there’s nothing you want to watch and you’re not enjoying it and there’s a million other things you’d rather be doing. It pulls you in like a black hole.
I’ve recently been trying to claw back some time, not so much for work but for the things around work. My podcast app is spilling over with interesting but unlistened-to episodes; Audible keeps reminding me just how many unspent credits I have; and as I tentatively start on my first book proposal I’ve been worried about needing to read all of the books. While I’ve been getting everything done at work, there’s not much getting done around work, so I wanted to look at my time saps and see what I could change.
Of course, there is more than one factor at play here (perhaps I’ll write about the others later), but it is much easier to change one thing at a time, and the easiest one of those was the TV.
I realised how little joy I was getting from the TV I was watching. I’d got into a habit of spending all evening watching re-runs of Friends or Catfish – I’m ashamed to say that often this would start about 4pm and go through to about 9pm. Five hours. I’d never really thought about how long that was until now. Often I’d be doing other things at the same time, like posting on Instagram or replying to emails but still. Five hours a day spent on activity that I wasn’t getting really any joy from.
So, one night I decided not to turn it on. At first I felt bereft, afloat at sea with nothing to hold onto – what on earth do I do? I was so unused to not having a television as my evening’s company that I almost wondered whether I should go and have my night time bath at 5pm. Then I thought, “I could actually start that book”. And I did. The last time I finished a book was on holiday in July last year, this was the longest I’d spent reading since then. It was nice – nice to follow through on something, nice to actually open one of the books I buy, nice to feel stimulated. It’s one of those annoying things that people on podcasts lecture you about but is actually true – reading stimulates new ideas and thoughts.
After reading for an hour or so, I still had all this time. So, I plugged a podcast into my speaker and cuddled the dog on the sofa while I listened – no multi-tasking, just really listening. Whenever over the years I’ve thought about my ideal evening it’s always looked like this – lamplight, quiet, a good book, a glass of wine, favourite podcasts. I guess that the TV habit was so strong and unquestioned that it never occurred to me that I had the choice to give that to myself.
I haven’t turned the TV on since. Rather than the click of the remote signalling the end of the work day, it is now turning on the Bluetooth on the speaker. I am listening to at least one podcast a day, and spending at least one hour a day reading a book – which still gives me 2 or 3 hours of former TV time which I’m filling with reading newsletters, doing extra tarot spreads, reading magazines, cooking, Instagram, extra bits of work or writing. More than anything, I feel like I’m living rather than sleep-walking.
This isn’t a total TV ban. The minute I ban something from myself I want to do it, and when Dan comes home at around 10pm he’ll usually put it on. We still watch Match of the Day. What role do I want television to have in my life? Like I said, for me it’s never been for me about consuming drama, that’s not the value I get. Where I’ve landed is that I want to watch TV in the way you did when you were off school sick. It’s rare and feels at once taboo and guilt-free, an occasional one off comfort, rather than an everyday routine. At the root of this I want to stop having defaults in my life – things that I just do without intention. I don’t want to watch TV all evening because it’s a default, I want to make it a choice.
