Television in decline

My decision to be more social and start exercising has resulted in another surprising change. The time I devote to watching television time has dropped some 80%. I used to watch between 15 and 20 hours of television a week. It now stands at about 2 hours and 20 minutes a week. Why so exact? Because I watch television while I put in my 20 minutes on the exercise machine. Over the course of a week, 20 minutes a day is 140 minutes.

My television intake will increase once the new television season starts. Since I’ve got a PVR, what will probably happen is I’ll program it to record all the shows I used to follow, and I’ll quickly be come overwhelmed. Then I’ll have to purge.

I’m currently working my way through David Starkey’s Monarchy, a documentary series about the history of the English monarchy, from the Saxon period to modern times. It’s a fantastic program, but each weekly episode only fills two days of exercising. I’ve blown through the first part of the season four Battlestar Galactica episodes Tanya has recorded for me and look forward to the remainder. Once zip.ca starts sending me The Sopranos again, each of those episodes will claim three days. Already my TV time is tightly packed.

Lori wrote, “I pretty much only have time for one show at a time.” This was a completely alien thought to me in the past…but with her schedule, I can see why it’s her norm. Now however, I see it moving in that direction for me simply because there are more important things to do.

The weird part is I’m not really sure what I spend my time on once the visiting and exercising is done. I’m trying to write more, and I also need to devote more effort to reading and getting to sleep earlier. Getting my place into a more orderly state is an ongoing task but it’s been slow going so far. I need to kick it into gear.