TheGeoffRe(y)port

There was a time, when I would wile away the hours with nothing better to do than sit around all evening watching television. But no longer - I have found the secrets to solving my spare time issues. And today I hope to share those very secrets with you.

Step 1: Start a blog
This step should absolutely come first, because having a blog means that if the dangers of spare time threaten to de-rail your spare-timelessness plans, then you will have a fall-back position. Ideally your blog should encompass writing about almost every aspect of your life: remember that eating up time, not growing a readership, is the goal. Write posts as often as you can manage - you should be able to slot in at least two posts a day when the rhythmn is really flowing.

To increase the mileage from your blog it is best if you run your blog from your own host, rather than signing up to Wordpress.com or Blogger. This means that you are now able to dispense with that pesky spare time playing around with your server settings, colleting statistics upon statistics and just generally tinkering. Make it your goal to reply to any comment on the blog within 10 minutes. This will mean that even when it looks like you’re not doing anything, you are actually just poised to reply to any possible comments. Build up a readership of people who will hassle you if you go more than a day or two if you don’t post.

Step 2: Get involved in a youth ministry
Few combatants of spare time are more effective than having an a group of people that you are committed to. And who needs your help more than “the youth of today”? Take on a leadership role in the church’s local youth ministry and before you know it you’ll be finding new and innovative ways of curing any excess leisure time. Organising a friday night activity for teenagers can take up time in an almost limitless fashion - there will always be more that you can do.

Step 3: Participate in part-time study
Everyone knows that while full-time students have got the easiest life imaginable - and thus have an endless supply of spare time they need to waste, if you are able to combine full-time work with part-time study you will find that the extra hours will disappear as if by magic. Assigments and studying both take large amounts of time, time that you would otherwise have spare. The best solution is to choose a course that will cause you to reconsider lots of the things that you have previously accepted, causing you to have that lingering feeling that you should really read up more on that. Before you know it you’ll have no spare time left at all!

Step 4: Install Ubuntu onto a laptop
Nothing dispenses of time quite like having a new operating system to tinker with. And Ubuntu is ideal for exactly that, it opens up thousands of opportunities for you to play around with all kinds of settings. Installing on a laptop adds extra time-utilisation benefits because of the added wireless connectivity, power management and hardware component drivers to locate, install and customize. The possibilities with a linux distribution are limited only by your desire to tinker and fiddle.

Step 5: Get a girlfriend
Note: Despite common misconceptions about the type of people who install Ubuntu on a laptop, this step is still possible whilst participating in Step 4. No, seriously!

For dealing with entire days or evenings at a time of spare time, you cannot go past a girlfriend. The best part, chances are she’ll do lots of the work for you. Your social circle triples, and with that comes a huge number of people who want to meet “the boyfriend”. Plus you’ll want to spend time together separate from others, plus there’s now a family who wants to meet you, and your own family will suddenly show an interest in getting to know your new love. Before you know it your girlfriend will be finding new and innovative ways of dealing with your pesky spare time for you. You’ll spend Saturdays at Art Galleries, evenings at the movies, the options are infinite.

Final Tips
There are certainly other measures that have helped me on my journey towards spare-timelessness. Subscribing to 100+ blogs is a surefire way to deal with many an hour of extra time. Participating in Darren Rowse’s ProBlogger Group Writing Projects will certainly fill in an hour or two. You won’t necessarily need all of these steps, you may find that two or three suffice. Chances are you’ll even find that you are able to discover your own ways of countering the spare-time concerns. Good Luck, and happy time killing.