105 hours: No time for TV

I use a set of tactics and principles to manage my time. I call it 105 hours.

It helps me allocate the 105 hours I have in the week.

Today, we spend too many of those hours watching TV.

So I decided to stop.

Netflix is also TV

I no longer watch any TV-like content: Netflix, Amazon, AppleTV, Hulu, Disney.

No TV shows, no movies, no sports.

When I tell others I don't watch TV, I sometimes hear, "Oh yeah! Me neither. TV is a waste of time!" But when I clarify by asking, "No streaming? No Netflix?" they'll quickly backpedal, "Oh, you mean streaming too? Oh no, I do watch that!"

Despite stopping to watch movies and sports, my biggest problem is with TV shows.

TV shows are the "smartphoneization" of movies. It's something we "binge" on. A low friction media consumption. The episode ends, and the next one starts in anywhere between 5 and 20 seconds, depending on how blatant they are about keeping us sucked in.

Like Instagram Stories and TikTok feeds that never end or the Twitter timeline that we pull for updates, we are encouraged to bet the next one will be as good or better than the last: a quick swipe or a wait of a few seconds and the next one promptly comes to us.

Then next thing we know, we've just spent 3 hours in front of the TV and will sleep late again.

TV Shows claim time we don't have

From a time allocation standpoint, people who say they have no time for important things will quickly admit they spend hours watching TV.

It's not our fault: TV shows are built to be a time sink. They're engineered to be consumed for several hours a day – more on the weekends.

When discussing TV shows, I sometimes ask people, "So, how long is this TV show?" but their definition of short doesn't match mine. "This one is short; there are only two seasons out," which, while short compared to the average, means anywhere from 10 to 20 hours.

10 to 20 hours!!

Importantly, the number of TV shows is now virtually infinite. No matter our tastes, there are more TV shows we'll enjoy watching than we have time each week to watch.

We're always "behind," like watching TV shows was a task we're failing to accomplish.

I don't see as big a problem with watching TV in itself. It's more about the "platformization" of TV that creates the same drawbacks of social media: dragging us in with more and more unlimited content, pulling us away from things we care about as a result.

Five hours is enough for Movies and Sports

I don't believe 0 hours is the right amount to allocate to TV for everybody. Some of us love following sports, some of us love watching movies, and some of us .. well, love TV shows.

But if I allocated 5 hours a week to TV, I could watch my favorite NBA and NFL teams play.

In 5 hours, I can watch 2 movies, enough to see all academy award winners and much more – a staggering 100 movies a year.

But 5 hours a week doesn't go very far on TV shows. It lets me watch a TV show per.. month, perhaps?

While 5 hours is enough for movies and sports, those who watch TV shows spend much more than 5 hours a week on TV.

We watch too much TV

The amount of time spent watching TV by the average American is discouraging.

I'm not writing to the average person, but spending a reasonable amount of time watching TV makes anybody an outlier. Controlling TV use is not only an excellent thing for living a good life but also a substantial competitive advantage.

In Beyond Wealth, Alexander Green quotes Nielsen reporting 4 hours a day as the TV watching time for parents and their kids. He contrasts that with time spent in meaningful conversation: 3.5 minutes.

In the book 168 Hours, Laura Vanderkam brings some anecdotes from her time diary studies with subjects, reporting a slightly lower number: 3.3 hours on average.

Americans in general, also watch a lot of television—more than 30 hours per week, according to Nielsen, though the time-diary studies put this number a lot lower (2.62 hours per day averaged overall, or 3.3 for people who watched TV, coming out to 18–23 hours per week). That last stat, of course, begs the question: Why are the time-diary numbers wildly different than the answers people give in other surveys? With the TV numbers, the reason appears to be that for ratings, Nielsen wants to know whether the TV is on, whereas time diaries tend to record “primary activities.” People mention the TV only if they are paying attention to the programming.

Vanderkam, Laura. 168 Hours (pp. 18-19). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

It's hard to extrapolate or ensure the numbers are reliable, so I hesitate to quote them or put much weight into them. Their magnitude does match my anecdotal experience, though.

I won't try to guess how much time people spend watching streaming services since there are no official figures, but I advise you to track your own time and note that unless you do, you're probably underestimating your TV use.

Most of us don't have the time

Like a strapped-for-cash person who spends money without a budget only to realize at the end of the month that they can't make ends meet, we frivolously spend evenings and weekends on TV and then complain of a lack of time.

When we put pen to paper, we realize our personal time is too limited to do what we want and spend more than 5 hours a week on TV.

A person who hasn't spent much money and time removing chores from their week often has nowhere near 30 hours a week of personal time available. They have chores, kids, work, and family obligations. They may have 10 personal hours, maybe 15.

Add watching TV shows to that week, and there's no personal time left for anything else. Literally anything else.

Add the internet on top of that, and it's no wonder we think we have no time.

Having a precise number of hours for TV, be it 0 or 5 hours, helps us spend our limited time as we intend to.