Reddit can be used to show you just how unproductive you are. Here are a few metrics:
- Time to first visit: On busy days, you don’t visit reddit until the end of the day. Most days, that time is much earlier.
- Longest time in between visits: By definition, this is the longest amount of time you could have been focused on a given task.
- Frequency: how often you hit reddit.com shows how easily distracted you get or how frequently you yearn for distraction
- Purple links: Do you go to reddit just for the news or do you actually go click on things? Sometimes I click on things just to make all the links purple. This almost seems OCD. I can’t begin to explain the awful void I feel when all the links have been visited. Why doesn’t the internet update faster?
- Concurrent tabs open: you are so distracted, you didn’t realize you already had a reddit tab open. This is real bad.
- Blogging about reddit: rock bottom.
What have I been up to lately? I’ve been very busy and a bit sleep deprived. The worst part is when I look back, it doesn’t seem like much. (Too much reddit, not enough work!) I have trouble putting things into perspective sometimes—I implemented a neat hack for my research group which made the total code 5-12% faster. Apparently, that’s really good, but when you’re aiming for 400%, 10% feels like pocket change.
I saw my freshman year roommate the other day at dinner. I hadn’t seen him in a very long time. It brought back good memories, mostly of him reading my papers and reminding me how little I understand the English language. I tried to use the excuse that it was my second language but being unable to speak another language does not help that argument. One new bit of the English language I learned from him is that the colon (:) can be used to split two clauses that are semi-related (more related than when joined with the semi-colon). Now that I think about it, he was probably pulling my leg: no one uses the colon like that.
That's a lot of reddit reading ;o