Although it may be to varying degrees, everyone at some point experiences boredom that leaves you sitting in a chair with no idea what to do. Most often this occurs after a long day of study/work, but sometimes it can creep up on you during the weekend. Since my coaching of rugby finished 2 weeks ago I’ve been at a loss for things to do on a saturday morning. There are many strategies to approach this type of boredom, and some are more individually tailored than others. Here is what I get up though:
Stage 1: Firstly, if I’m bored I’ll be on the computer. I could be doing a number of things outside or inside, but instead I’ll just park myself on the swivel chair in front of the macbook pro and 2nd monitor and proceed to click on the tweetdeck and then firefox icons. At this point I have a couple of stable options which I’ll head to if I’m bored. The first of which is facebook. If I’m really bored I may just scroll thru the last day of the news feed. This won’t achieve anything. The next option is flickr. I’ll head to my flickr site and check my view count for the day to see which photos are getting more looks. I may also check out some of my contacts photos if any look interesting. By now I’ve wasted about 15-20mins if I’m lucky. At this point there are some secondary options which I explore.
Stage 2: After having a scroll through facebook and flickr I will either check on the latest camera rumours from Northlight Images, head to twitter and check out the latest spammer that has decided to add me, or check up on what is on tv tonight. Any of these options can be pursued. If there have been some fresh and interesting rumours of upcoming cameras then I will normally click through the links try and find out the details. Hopefully by this time I have wasted another 15-20mins.
You’re probably noticing now that what I do when bored isn’t about completing anything interesting, it is about wasting time. The more time that I waste, the closer it’ll be to something interesting happening. If I have now passed through Stage 1 and 2 and am still bored then I will progress to Stage 3.
Stage 3: Stumble. This has got to be one of the greatest boredom tools ever invented on the internet. If you have firefox and you don’t stumble, then you’re missing out. Basically it is a firefox toolbar (not ads or anything annoying like that) that you put your preferences of sites which you’re interested in in and then it randomly selects one and sends you to it. Pages are added to stumble by people clicking the ‘like’ thumbs up icon. I’ve got mine set to graphic design, photography, humour and a couple other categories. This little Stumble button can keep me going on the internet for hours on end. Since the only pages that you stumble upon are those liked by other people, you get more quality than crap. I have found many an interesting article or image through Stumble. A nice feature of Stumble is that it gives you a great indication of how bored you have been. I just checked my profile and it turns out that I have Stumbled 6845 times. That is just nuts. That is 6845 clicks on the little Stumble button. It is not just me who is addicted to Stumble though. Across the world there are millions of people that turn to Stumble to waste some boredom time, and when you stumble on a good laugh or a stunning image it gives you a buzz and makes the boredom that much more bearable.
Alas there is no Stage 4 of my boredom cycle. Stumble-ing is normally the final stage because it is by that time that I realise I am wasting a fair bit of time and should get off the internet. Of course these stages aren’t set in stone. Often Stage 2 and 3 will be punctuated by checks of facebook to see if anyone has written a comment. If this happens then you know that I’ve hitched a ride on the boredom train to timewasterville. FUN!
So as you can see I have specific strategies for wasting boredom-filled time. This is time when I really should be doing uni work. But hey, who wants to do uni work when you have the internet?!? Do you have any specific actions which you go through when you’re scraping the bottom of the barrel?
Nelson to
