Managing Boredom
It's easy to deal with being busy. At least, we know what we're supposed to be doing. And those times when we're fried and need to distract ourselves with something utterly pointless? No problem: pull up a Flash game or read a trashy novel or watch some asinine TV show. But what about those times when we feel like we want something to do, but can't think of anything?
A month or two I read Cognitive Surplus, which introduces the idea of free time as a collective resource. The most famous example is, of course, Wikipedia. Writers and editors and contributors to the discussion forums had, as of 2010, contributed a total of around one hundred million (100,000,000) hours to making Wikipedia what it is.
That may seem like a big number. It's a tiny bit more than the amount of miles between the earth and the sun, and it's almost two thirds of the amount of student loans I owe. But it's really not a big number, compared to others. People on planet Earth spent 1 trillion (1,000,000,000,000) hours watching television in 2010. That's ten thousand Wikipedia projects, spent staring at a screen.
Shirky's point isn't that TV is a waste of time. You can get a lot of value from treating good TV shows as a community experience. Rather, the point is that people, collectively, have a freakish, ridiculous, obscene amount of power to accomplish things that isn't being used for anything, because there aren't mechanisms in place to connect and coordinate people's efforts on that scale.
Not yet, anyway. We're getting there. There are a ridiculous amount of crowdsourcing projects out there, most of which you can find through simple web searches or on Wikipedia itself. Here are a few of my favorites:
So the next time you're bored and want to do something, but not anything on your to-do list, please consider helping out some of these worthy projects, or finding others that appeal to you even more. It's amazing what large numbers of people putting in negligible effort can accomplish. Laziness is a virtue - you just have to leverage it in the right direction.
A month or two I read Cognitive Surplus, which introduces the idea of free time as a collective resource. The most famous example is, of course, Wikipedia. Writers and editors and contributors to the discussion forums had, as of 2010, contributed a total of around one hundred million (100,000,000) hours to making Wikipedia what it is.
That may seem like a big number. It's a tiny bit more than the amount of miles between the earth and the sun, and it's almost two thirds of the amount of student loans I owe. But it's really not a big number, compared to others. People on planet Earth spent 1 trillion (1,000,000,000,000) hours watching television in 2010. That's ten thousand Wikipedia projects, spent staring at a screen.
Shirky's point isn't that TV is a waste of time. You can get a lot of value from treating good TV shows as a community experience. Rather, the point is that people, collectively, have a freakish, ridiculous, obscene amount of power to accomplish things that isn't being used for anything, because there aren't mechanisms in place to connect and coordinate people's efforts on that scale.
Not yet, anyway. We're getting there. There are a ridiculous amount of crowdsourcing projects out there, most of which you can find through simple web searches or on Wikipedia itself. Here are a few of my favorites:
- Galaxy Zoo: help astronomers classify astronomical objects. Hipster astronomy was doing crowdsourcing before it was cool - there's so much up there that professionals can't possibly deal with it all, and amateurs have always made large contributions to the field. Galaxy Zoo makes it even easier to help out. You don't even need a telescope.
- Zooniverse has 11 projects other than Galaxy Zoo, from classifying cancer samples, to deciphering whale song, to correlating old ship's logs with world maps to pinpoint older weather patterns.
- Ur Crowdsource: Interested in history? Help transcribe the field notes of the archaeologists who were excavating Ur between 1922 and 1934.
Foldit: Addicted to Flash and puzzle games? Play this tricky little beast to help decode the molecular basis for genetic diseases.
So the next time you're bored and want to do something, but not anything on your to-do list, please consider helping out some of these worthy projects, or finding others that appeal to you even more. It's amazing what large numbers of people putting in negligible effort can accomplish. Laziness is a virtue - you just have to leverage it in the right direction.