I made a startling realization the other day. I’m lazy. Sure, I work and study just as much as I should during the weeks, I exercise about four times a week and I walk my dog. It is not that kind of lazy. It’s in my admittedly well-earned spare time that I am lazy.

As university, and later work, started taking up more time, I made up for it by doing less when I am not working. Don’t get me wrong, I belong to the group of people that believe that overtime is unproductive and even hurtful in the long haul - all hail the 40 hour week! What I mean is that spare time does not have to equal ass-on-couch-time.

If I were to take the Proust Questionnaire in Vanity Fair (why that would ever happen is beside the point), my answer to the question of my greatest extravagance would have to be TV-shows. I absolutely love TV-shows. Nothing wrong with that, but the problem is that all those 20 or 40 or 60 minutes of TV start to add up when one episode is followed by another and so on. It’s probably not close to crack cocaine on the addiction scale, but it is a time sink.

I am sure that most people have these time sinks, whether it is TV-shows, movies, shopping, sleeping or something else. These are all great things, but I realize that they are well complemented with reading a book (Fifty Shades of Grey does not count) or a magazine (the ones by actual journalists), writing a journal, learning a second/third/fourth language or working on a side project.

Why would you want to do this? It is basically all about self-improvement, and even though self-improvement have become something of a farce with highly paid coaches and quasi-science, it doesn’t take a genius to guess that there is a link between improving upon oneself and your confidence and happiness, which in turn is linked to success. If you are interested in the topic I can recommend both the paper “The benefits of frequent positive affect: does happiness lead to success?” by Lyubomirsky et. al. and the book “59 Seconds” by Richard Wiseman.

Now wrap up your procrastination and go read a book.