How Much Time Are You Spending On Your Escape Box?
One of the biggest productivity destroyers
1 Year Of No TVs In My Home
I’m heading into my one-year mark of not owning a TV. It’s one of my little experiments. I watch TV occasionally, but it’s much less frequent since I don’t own a physical TV.
TV feels good. It’s a comfort mechanism. Even though I didn’t spend much time in front of the TV previously, and it was usually on mute or low volume, it was frequently being leveraged as a comfort vice.
The beginning of my no-tv experiment genuinely started as procrastination.
Then, I realized there wasn’t much time for TV because I was more focused on my goals. The more time spent on TV, the more progress on goals would suffer.
We Become What We Think About
Earl Nightingale has a famous recording called “The Strangest Secret” (listen to this recording if you get a chance; you will become starstruck just by the sound of his voice).
Ultimately, he goes on to convey we become what we think about most of the time.
But in the recording, he also mentions how human beings spend most of their time doing what everyone else does, which includes:
Waking up and immediately feeling tired after 6–8 hours of rest.
Not tapping into the unlimited potential of the human mind.
Coming home from work and turning on the escape box.
Getting arbitrary jobs.
Instead of spending our waking hours being productive, we throw it away on the escape box.
People don’t tend to watch one hour of TV; they watch hours daily.
A binge here and there won’t hurt you.
A binge all the time hurts you and your goals significantly.
What are you thinking about if you spend countless hours in front of the TV daily?
You’re likely thinking about or having thoughts influenced by the content you regularly consume from the TV.
Much of the stuff on TV is garbage, so what are people becoming who are constantly consuming valueless TV?
How Much Time We All Have
The average person gets 5–8 hours of sleep, which leaves around 16–19 waking hours.
If said person has a job that takes up 8 hours of their day, they now have 8–11 hours outside of work to do something productive with their life (e.g., read, work on a goal, exercise, meditate, walk, etc.).
We all get the same amount of time each day, yet most of us waste this time on meaningless and unproductive activities such as the escape box.
There Is Nothing Wrong With The Escape Box
Let’s reiterate that there is nothing wrong with watching TV.
The problem comes when you prioritize the TV over bettering your life day in and day out.
How many hours of TV are you getting in each week?
How many hours of productive time on your goals are you getting in each week?
The TV time should never be more than productive time spent on your goals; if so, you’re priorities are misaligned, and you will likely stifle your progress, growth, and development.
What will it be: Your favorite show or movie or your goals?
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I was surprised this was about TV and not phones. Maybe that’s because we ration TV quite hard in our house.
I never watch TV unless it’s a group activity. The whole family watching something.
What does annoy me though is when a family sits down to watch a programme and then they all pull out their phones and disappear into a separate world.