I don’t watch a ton of TV, but we do have a rather good sized television with a satellite dish and 500+ channels to watch at any hour of the day. So, even though I don’t think we’re out of control or addicted to the boob tube, I guess it does play a rather large part of my life.

Maybe that’s why I was so unsettled by an article today on Unclutterer about getting rid of your TV. Apparently, we Americans spend an average of 4 1/2 hours per day watching it, which adds up to roughly 1,600 hours a year. As Donald Miller once said,

“…I don’t know about you, but that almost competes with my quiet time.”

It makes me think about how many things I get done in a day, how many things are left unfinished, and how my time is really allocated. That thought doesn’t even begin to touch on how many advertisements and commercial messages are being pushed in front of my face during those 1,600 hours of television per year.

But the proverbial nail-in-the-coffin to my self-pity for being “just too busy to get it done” was secured by this quote:

Don’t say you don’t have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein.
— H. Jackson Brown

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