People say they’re too busy to exercise, too tired to cook, too overwhelmed to read, and too stressed to spend time with friends. Then they watch Netflix for four hours.
Something doesn’t add up, and I think I know what it is. The hours spent watching don’t count as hours spent. They feel like the absence of activity instead of a use of time, and that makes them easy to lose.
What was my own number?
Before 2014 I spent roughly a thousand hours a year watching other people’s creative work. A thousand hours. That’s a serious part-time job. That’s more time than most people spend on anything they’d list as an interest, and I was spending it on the finished output of other people’s effort.
After 2014 I spent those hours producing my own.
The book on this: Turn Off the TV, Get Off Your Ass, and Do Something is 270 pages on the arithmetic of your own hours, first written in 2016 and rewritten for a world that put the whole internet in your pocket.
Did you have to give things up?
No, and people misread that every time.
I didn’t become productive by giving things up. I became productive by changing what I was doing with the same hours.
The distinction matters because sacrifice is a terrible engine. Anything framed as deprivation runs on willpower, and willpower is a finite resource that everybody eventually runs out of. What I did wasn’t deprivation. The hours were already allocated to leisure. They stayed allocated to leisure. What changed was whether that leisure involved making anything. The outputs since are the result of redirecting a thousand hours a year from the consuming side to the contributing side. Anybody with those hours has the same option.
Most days now have a shape to them. Client work takes the morning, my own books get the afternoon, and client work comes back in the evening, with the blocks shuffled around when they need to be. I think of that afternoon block as the thousand hours finally put to work, and I wouldn’t trade it back for any show ever made.
Is watching television bad for you?
No, and books that argue otherwise are both wrong and unhelpful. Television is a real art form, some of it is extraordinary, and a person who never watched anything would be missing something worth having. I still watch things. The book isn’t an argument for a monastic life.
The question is what those particular hours would produce if they went somewhere else, and whether, having seen both options written down, you’d prefer the other one.
For most people the answer to that is uncertain, and that’s fine. Never having asked is how the thousand hours disappear.
Why did Turn Off the TV need rewriting?
Because I wrote the first version in 2016, when the biggest digital distraction was cable television and the occasional smartphone check.
The competition for those hours has changed completely since then.
Today it’s a feed engineered by people whose full-time job is holding your attention, available in every room, in every gap, with no beginning and no end. A scheduled program at least ended. I hate how much of this is by design, because the companies building those feeds know exactly how many hours they’re taking from people who’d rather be making something.
The 2016 advice targeted something you had to actively choose. The current version targets something that arrives whether you choose it or not, and those need different arguments.
How do you find out your own number?
By counting for a fortnight, which almost nobody does and which does more than any resolution.
Not estimating. Counting. Your phone will tell you its part. The rest is a note on a piece of paper. Two weeks is enough to get a figure, and the figure is nearly always considerably higher than the guess.
The number is persuasive in a way that arguments aren’t. You can dispute an argument about attention and modern life. It’s very difficult to dispute your own screen time report multiplied by fifty-two.
What do you do with the number?
Redirect instead of remove. Don’t resolve to watch less. Decide what those hours are for instead, and the watching takes care of itself.
Start with a tenth. A hundred hours a year is two hours a week and it’s enough to write a book. You don’t need the thousand.
Make the alternative easier to start than the feed. Whatever you’re redirecting into needs to be within reach, because the feed is always within reach.
Don’t treat it as sacrifice. Framed as loss it won’t survive a bad week. Framed as substitution it doesn’t need to.
Count again in six months. The number drifts back and nobody notices without measuring.
I keep coming back to that arithmetic because it’s unarguable. A thousand hours a year, for years, watching other people make things. Everything I’ve written since came out of the same hours, doing something else.
