Yesterday I was talking online after work, and all of a sudden I just got this urge to throw my computer against a wall. Was it broken? no. Was I angry? no. I just really didn’t want to stare at the screen any longer… so I went over to a friends place and we went for a walk through a local park… it was good.

So…. I realize I’ve been definitely slacking off on the blog, but I have to tell you by the time I get home from work where I’ve been staring at a screen all day long, and then working on a few computer related projects at the house… I really don’t want to look at a computer any longer.

… which brings me to the topic of today’s post (if you haven’t assumed already) … computer time!

All right, so let’s be honest, how many hours a day do you spend in front of the computer? For me at least the number is rather disgusting. In the morning after getting a shower and such I check my email and maybe see if there are any headline news stories worth reading before going to work. So at most I spend 15 minutes on the computer before leaving for work.

+0.25 hours

Now I’m at work, this is simple; I’m on the computer all day at work. I might have an hour or two of meetings, so for arguments sake let’s say I have one hour of meetings five days of the week. That taken into consideration with working about eight hours a day, I will give a conservative estimate and say I’m on the computer for seven hours each day at work.

+7.00 hours

Time to head home from work… I hop on the highway and in a quick 30 minutes I’m back at the house, upstairs, putting on more comfortable clothes and doing what? Hitting up pandora.com for all my music needs, checking emails, and chatting with people online. This probably takes about 30 minutes on average.

+0.50 hours

From here on is a little sketchy, it all depends on the day. Everything before changing clothes after work is pretty set in stone, but depending on evening activities I might not be on the computer at all, or I might be on all night. Let’s just take for example a ‘normal’ evening, where I do hang out with people but I still have some time to myself.

Let’s say after changing clothes I’m having good conversation with someone online and I keep talking to them. I get home from work sometime between 5:30 and 6:00, so I probably talk to this person, or persons until 7:30, when I’m ready for dinner. Let’s say this lasted one hour and 45 minutes.

+1.75 hours

We eat dinner in the kitchen away from all screens having nice conversation and talking about what we’re doing for the evening. People are usually over for dinner, so I won’t get back on the computer until they leave… about 11:00pm. After they leave I’ll hop on the computer, check emails, play a card game or two, chat with other people with no faces until I’m too sleepy to stay up anymore… which is probably around 12:30am

+1.50 hours

Lather, rinse, and repeat, eh?

Let’s add this up… as long as the windows calculator hasn’t started to fail me now… I’m getting a total of…
11 HOURS

can you say Holy Cow! That is a disgusting number of hours… almost half of one day (including sleep) is spent staring at a little glowing screen. This doesn’t even include time that I’m watching TV or playing Nintendo… I should seriously look into making this number go down.

Real quick… that’s just 5 days of the workweek, my weekend computer usage is much less.
Saturday: I’ll be on for maybe and hour or two in the morning and probably at night, but not too often during the day. So I’m going to estimate 4.5 hours of computer time on a Saturday.
Sunday: Even less, maybe an hour in the morning after church, and probably about 2 hours before bed maybe? so let’s go with 3 hours on a Sunday.

That makes a total of 7.5 hours for the weekend, plus the 5*11=55 for the weekdays, we’re at a total of 62.5 hours per week. Nasty.

Let’s multiply that by 50 for a year (because of vacations and such) and we’re getting 62.5*50=
3125 HOURS

I know… 7.5*50=1875 hours of that is at work, which is the majority, but that is still a lot of hours on a computer. What would we ever do without them…. crazy

How many hours do you spend on your computer a day? I know… it’s depressing…