I am a time waster. And I’m good at it too. I waste a lot of time every day. For every hour of work I spend at least two hours not doing anything. Doing anything but work. Postponing the start of the work by all means possible, lazily dragging myself to the point when there’s no chance of escape and my back is finally and truly against the wall.
Well, I hear you say, you’re not alone. What’s so unique about being a time waster, a procrastinator? Nothing, obviously. Every one of us procrastinates on a daily basis, regardless of our occupation, willpower and general state of mind. We all spend away the precious hours (including some of those eight paid-by-employers hours) by doing totally useless things. And don’t tell me that checking email every 10 minutes, reading the news, tweeting and updating Facebook status, munching an apple, etc are not useless things when you’re supposed to be working. There is a theory that an average office worker spends only three hours out of their daily eight actually doing some work. That is five hours, or more than sixty percent of that workers’ time, gone to the gutter. Needless to say, the same can be said about non-office workers too.
But I must say that I am a special time waster. I am different from millions of others who waste time for the sake of wasting time, to make their long hours go faster, to draw nearer the end of the working day. I waste time to be able to work. This sounds absurd, doesn't it? But not only is it not absurd, it is also necessary.
My day always starts with time wasting and I am never able to concentrate on my daily tasks if I haven’t spent a couple of hours on useless stuff.
I start the day by checking the email and reading some stuff I usually read on the internet (football pages, news etc). Then on my way to the library, where I do all of my work, the real time wasting starts. I go to a coffee shop to get an americano and linger there for at least half an hour, pretending to be reading that long article in the reviews section of the morning paper. From there I walk to Ryman the stationers on Sidney Street, where I waste another 15 minutes looking at fountain pens and feeling the smooth paper of Oxford notebooks. The nearby Waterstone’s is where I waste most of my time, though: the ground floor with all the new books, none of which I buy, of course; the winding walk up the stairs to the third floor, where I go through the familiar shelves of history and philosophy books. Add another ten minutes wasted in the travel books and guides department, and my time at the bookshop easily passes the hour. From there I walk to Corpus, where I go through the daily ritual of checking my pigeonhole, lingering in the library ground floor near the shelf with the periodicals (Sight&Sound is my all-time favourite magazine on that shelf). Only having made sure that I’ve wasted enough time in the library do I sit down and start working. And I do work for some time, without distractions.
I see this timewasting as a necessary ritual, something to appease my body, to prepare my mind for the day ahead. It is a ritual that helps me trick my lazy mind. It is a kind of ‘no excuses’ approach - having wasted so much time here and there, my mind and body have no excuses at the time when I’m finally at the desk, reading or writing. This understanding, this deal, if you like, between myself and my mind is a part of my attempts to come to terms with my existence, with the problems that only I can solve, the way in which my mind works. I don’t regret the time wasted as it leads to peace of mind and, sometimes, serendipity and inspiration (especially after the long hours spent in the bookshop).
