Let’s start small: is there a TV personality or show that habitually wastes your time? For example, Rachel Maddow, with whom I agree on most everything, is unwatchable for me because she takes an hour to deliver about twenty minutes’ worth of material. Her opening four or five minutes, for example, is usually irrelevant to what she has to say: a promotion of some project she’s working on, an extended conversation with the host of the previous show, a correction or elaboration of a remark she made elsewhere that I probably didn’t see, etc. Then the rest of her “A” block (as they call it) is extremely repetitious. If she’s focusing on some Trump horror of the day, for example, she states what Trump did or said and her response to it, but then she repeats that point, in slightly different wording, two or three more times, really saying nothing she hasn’t already said. So I’ve learned to tune in late (or to record it with my finger on the FF button) and once I’ve gotten the gist of what she has to say, to FF straight to her second segment, about 25 minutes into the show. I estimate that if someone were to put a gun to her head and say, “Do this whole show in 20 minutes,” she could do it easily and very little would be lost.
I’ve got lots of other examples of things that waste my time, but for now I’m asking what are your time wasters in TV, movies, books, art, music? And what are your solutions?
I listen to a lot of talk based radio and on a lot of the shows they play various trivia type games once in a while which is fun.
Going on a road trip I thought there must be some good game/trivia type podcasts out there that would pass the time. One I found was called Trivia something or other so I thought I’d give it a try.
While Jeopardy can ask 61 questions in a 20 minute show these podcasters just rambled on and on about mundane stuff in their lives and managed to ask and answer 3 questions in a 30 minute show.
My solution was to never listen to them ever again.
Curse of Oak Island. Regardless of whether anyone believes that any treasure is there, the editing/writing of the show spends the majority of its time in recaps, flashbacks, and asides, and very little time advancing the progress of the ‘plot’.
It’s almost as if the producers of such stuff don’t want you to continue to tune in, isn’t it? Sort of like the people who produce videos on Youtube entitled “Wait until the end of this one…” which I’ve learned to ignore entirely.
Wow, I do not find her a master storyteller at all. My wife used to watch Maddow’s show with me in the room and it was all too often agony with a capital A.
Most American reality TV shows will start with a recap of the last episode. Then the theme song. Then some actual content. Then about 45-60 seconds of “coming up later in the show…” then a commercial. Then the same pattern before every commercial. Then the juicy content they had been teasing happens but with no resolution - usually it’s some sort of “cliffhanger*”. Then they show a preview of next week’s show, or sometimes a preview of the rest of the season.
American reality TV is VERY VERY hard to watch without a fast-forward button.
*Cliffhangers usually end up being extremely edited scenes with much less consequence than the previews and beginning had made them seem.
100% of supposedly informative television takes an hour to deliver 5 minutes of content. She’s maybe a bit worse than others, but if you want efficient information transfer: read; don’t watch.
How about real life? I get together with a group of artists for coffee, and one older guy is too smart to be able to just tell a story.
He always starts with just enough content that you get your hopes up… but then decides that his listeners need “context”. A LOT of backstory. This might include the structure of greek tragedies, a history of chemical nomenclature, and a sociological analysis of his hometown.
I’m not exaggerating; he’ll combine two or three disparate subjects to expound on, so the rest of us are surreptitiously shrugging at each other, to signal “Nope, I’ve got no idea where this is going…”
Reminds me of a guy I know- every single anecdote is told in a convoluted, um, uh, no, well, that reminds me of, no what was his name, tangled web of digressions and irrelevant details which doubles back and wanders off and refers back to things he has not in fact said and is generally almost impossible to follow and takes about 30 times longer than it should do.
The really annoying thing in his case is that he’s had a truly extraordinary life and some of the stories would be absolutely fascinating in the hands of anyone who was in any way capable of communicating them. Every now and again this tiny gold nugget pans out of this stream of consciousness ramble and you realise you really should have been paying attention for the last 5 minutes.
Podcasts are notorious for this. I don’t mind a few life updates at the start of an episode, especially if I’ve been listening to the show for a long time, but this seems to be a common complaint if reviews are any indication. And there’s one podcast I subscribe to that the host feels the need to publish an hours-long Q&A every now and then, which consists of him reading the most banal listener questions and providing rambling answers. It’s easy enough to skip those, but geez.
One hell of a lot of modern entertainment content is one ounce of story and 3 pounds of filler. For a series, like anything on Discovery or a reality show, it’s far cheaper to make if each 30 minute episode (22 minutes after commercials) only needs to have filmed 3 minutes of new vid which is then spliced in with 19 minutes of flashbacks, trailers, commercial seque cards, or recaps.
Once you recognize the truth of there only being 3 minutes of fresh entertainment in 30 minutes, the only sane reaction is to switch off forever. There’s no efficient way to extract the 3 minutes.
One hell of a lot of YouTube how-tos have gone down the same hole. I recall learning from a thread here that there’s a big difference in the monetization of IIRC 8:00+ minute vids versus those 7:59 or shorter. So if it only takes 90 seconds to explain how to unclog a drain or remove the front panel on a washing machine, you’ll be treated to 6:30 of blah blah first. But they don’t put the meat in the last 90 seconds. So you can’t just FF there and watch that. It’s camouflaged somewhere in the middle, with no signal after it that the rest is just filler.
If the OP is looking for solutions to things designed to waste time, IMO the only answer is “refuse to participate in things designed to waste your time for their benefit.” The market will speak when everyone enough people adopt that POV.
Now there are things which are time wasters which aren’t maliciously designed to do so. Such as hanging out at the tire store while they change your tires. Surviving and minimizing those is a matter of off-peak timing, avoiding the most crowded stores, and always having the Dope on your phone.
ALL BBC news stories on their app that aren’t straight news. And even the straight news articles walk around the subject several times before lying down to sleep.
I’ll see an article about some sociocultural subject and think, “Oh, that’s interesting! Worth a read.” Nope. I’ll be at least two pictures into the article before the writer even begins to address the subject, much less provide a who, where, when, how, and why. I’m further amused by the irrelevant pictures further below. “Dallander Grimsby (right) lives in a village five miles from where the dragon ate a small dog and two budgies.”
And don’t get me going on their little shorts about nature and wildlife.
What was the one where contestants ran through an obstacle course? American Ninja Warrior? I always had to record and use FF when watching, because there were so many contestants where they had to show a five minute sob-story bio first, then the contestant would fail at the first or second obstacle. So I just started skipping all the backstory stuff.
