Time-waste Equilibrium

If you had kept half an ear open for the past few days you would have definitely heard of the advent of a mysterious thing called Google Plus, a social networking site on the lines of Facebook, which seems to have taken the world by a storm.  There are forum wars going on, the loyalists of each group engaged in cheeky ripostes and counter-ripostes and contributing a significant portion to the millions of terabytes of useless stuff which you find on Internet these days.  I knew that Google had something like this up its sleeves, as I had read a study published by them a year back on the concept of friend circles and stuff like that(Yes, seriously).  As I vaguely remember, the report demonstrated the concept, taking an example of a primary school teacher who had friends in a gay strip bar or something of that sort.  🙂

The reason I write this article is because of a hypothesis which recently struck me while working.   I am not sure if it holds true for anyone else, but it definitely holds true for me.  The hypothesis is that the amount of time wasted in the internet is roughly a constant over long periods of time subject to the availability of internet.  I have a certain lower threshold of time, I need to browse the net, which is imperative for me to work.  When there is a shortage of time, say a day before an exam, roughly for every two hours of work I put in, I need around an hour of net just to clear up my mind.  During normal days, when there isn’t any work to do and no assignments to submit, I have a upper cap of about 6 hours a day in front of the computer.  As the time is a constraint, there is a limit on the number of new things I venture into, on the internet.

To give you an example, say I have a Facebook Account, a Twitter Account and a RSS Feed.  Now, going by the higher limit of 6 hours, I roughly spend two hours on each of them and pack for the day.  This process continues everyday and I spend roughly equal amount of time browsing through each of these sites.  Things become interesting when there is a new entrant in the market.   Say something like Google Plus comes about.  And I create an account and I like it.  The number of free hours I have is still six.  But, it is difficult to divide my time equally among all four of them because I am used to spending two hours on each.  Soon, I find myself neglecting one of the accounts(while the other two accounts get their quota of two hours each) and finally just leaving it to rot, while I completely traverse all my energy into building a new account.(Note the use of the word build, for I feel it is not an easy job)

In 2007, when I joined IITM I had a GMail, Orkut and Blogger accounts.  I shall discount GMail as an instrument of time-waste as it is a necessary evil.  I also used to visit lots of Linux Forums to get it up and running in my computer and Wikipedia for that Dirac-Delta enthusiasm I had for quizzing in my 1st year.  That brings the total number of instruments of time-waste to 4.  As the year passed, I concentrated on writing new blog articles.  Then I discovered Google Reader.  Gradually, I shifted from a writing-driven time-waste mode to a reading-driven time-waste mode, that is I stopped blogging leaving the Blogger account to fall into a state of disuse.  Then, in mid-2008 I got a Facebook account.  The number of hours I spent visiting Orkut came down significantly until it met the same fate as the Blogger account.  And then I discovered Reddit.  Visits to the Linux Forums came down drastically.  Twitter came by and passed with hardly any sound as the name suggests as I could not comprehend the point of it’s existence in the first place.  Slashdot briefly usurped Reddit’s position until I came across Stumble-Upon, which I use even now.  The arrival of Google Buzz marked the demise of Google Reader, although I occasionally visit it to catch up with some internet comic strips.  Now, Google Plus has arrived.  Which activity will disappear from my current list of instruments of time-waste, I can only guess.  Structurally, it is similar to Facebook.  So, it may replace Facebook.  Or it may replace Google Buzz.  Or it may hinder my rejuvenated enthusiasm for blogging.  I do not know.

What do you people think?  Does this hold true for you too?  Is there a cap on the number of “instruments” of time-waste a single person can handle?  Drop in, with a word.  🙂