How to Eliminate TV from Your Life

Posted 7 months, 3 weeks ago at 2:10 pm. 1 comment

Most people love television. And for good reason - it has the ability to educate, to entertain, and to serve as entertainment when you’re too lazy to do anything else. But TV suddenly becomes the spawn of Satan when you begin to think of what else you could be doing in lieu of watching it.

Suppose you watch an hour and a half of TV per day. At the end of the week, that’s 10 1/2 hours that you spent in front of a rectangular box. What fun! During those 10 1/2 hours you sat and wasted in front of the TV could have been wisely invested in anything else productive: exercising, reading a good book, learning a new skill, learning a musical instrument, talking to friends, building a home business… the list goes on and on.

Eliminating TV from your life is one of the best things you can do to become more productive and make the ‘path to your destiny’ an even smoother, exciting trip. Here are some tips to get you started eliminating TV from your life today.

• Break the remotes. I’m serious - smash any and all remotes you own to bits! If you break the clicker, you have to manually get up and change the channel. Human beings are notorious for wanting everything to be as simple as possible; when you force yourself to add extra steps in completing a task, you are more likely to not engage in that activity at all. Does it work with TV? Absolutely. You are much more lazy than you think.
• Cut out cable or satellite TV. “Blasphemy!” you scream! But it’s true. How many programs do you actually watch on the network stations vs. satellite TV? Probably one or two vs. many, many more. By throwing those extra channels to the garbage, you now have less incentive to watch TV because nothing interesting is ever on.
• Don’t watch TV as “something to do”. When you want something to do, do anything else but TV watching. Read a book. Do some exercises. Call up or e-mail a friend you haven’t spoken to in a while. Once you plop yourself in front of the television set, you’re glued to that seat. You’ll tell yourself “Oh, I’ll just watch it for five minutes!” Those five minutes turn into ten minutes, and pretty soon you’ve watched four hours of mindless programming. You could have spent that time on anything else… advertising your blog, perhaps?
• Don’t watch TV while engaging in other activities. Don’t watch TV while you eat. Don’t watch TV while you exercise. Don’t watch TV while drifting off to sleep. Don’t watch TV while babysitting the neighbor’s kids (unless, of course, you put in a tape for them to watch). When you pair TV watching + other tasks, your other tasks suddenly become more drawn out and much more of a time waster. You don’t need to watch an episode of “Will & Grace” while you eat your slice of pizza for dinner - eating a pizza slice does not take you 30 minutes.
• If you MUST get your prime time TV fix, watch episodes online. Let’s see, you have YouTube now, where you can watch some episodes of select shows. And most network TV stations let you stream the most recent episodes online, for free, with little or no commercials. So why do you have to spend an hour watching “Ugly Betty”, when you can watch it on the ABC website for only 42 minutes? You have no excuses now!

With anything, less TV watching is hard at first. We are socially programmed to find television watching an acceptable form of behavior. But like with so many other behaviors, we are able to deprogram ourselves and live a happy, thrilling TV-free life!