Wil Wheaton's Geek in Review: Time Enough At Last

Last night, my wife and I drove past a store that repaired vacuums, sewing machines, and typewriters.

"Typewriters?" I said. "Does anyone still use a typewriter? Can you imagine how long it must take to get any real work done on a typewriter?"

As quickly as the words left my mouth, I imagined how great it must be to tell your boss (or, in my case, editor), "Sorry, my typewriter is in the shop so I need a few more days to spend on this story."

Around the middle of November, my friends and family started asking me what I wanted for Christmas. Because the Nintendo Wii was sold out everywhere, I came up with something just as difficult to give me, but slightly more thought-provoking: "I'd like more time."

I look around my house, and around my life, and find it filled with various bits of high powered technology. There are computers everywhere, and I'm rarely more than a few seconds away from the Internets. According to cartoons of the 1960s, my life should be largely automated (and humorously labeled) while I work for a few hours a day, and spend the rest of my time goofing off with all my favorite toys.

Yeah. That's not exactly the way things have worked out.

I have this huge trunk in my living room that cleverly masks its true purpose by acting as a coffee table: though it's covered with remote controls and magazines, it's filled with all my geeky games. Illuminati, Frag, Diplomacy, Kill Doctor Lucky, Settlers of Catan, Munchkin, and Talisman are all in there, along with some classics like Stratego and Battleship. I put them in there, instead of out in the garage, because I wanted to always have quick and easy access to them . . . just in case.

There was once a time when I'd assemble a squadron of Space Marines, and wouldn't get up from my desk until they were all painted (and the occasional Ultramarine had his head appropriately "blown off" by a heated ice pick) but trying to find time to paint even one 40K figure now is simply out of the question; that time would be better spent doing things with my wife and kids (which, it turns out, is much more important to me than adding another missile launcher guy to my army.)

In my office, I have two book cases that are filled with graphic novels, science fiction titles, and O'Reilly books. From Hell, Absolute Dark Knight and three anticipted-but-unread volumes of Transmetropolitan are right next to the collected works of Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, and too many Tor paperbacks that intrigued me enough to buy them to count. On higher shelves, all sorts of little animal faces peer out at me: Learning Perl, Programming PHP and A Big Book That Will Finally Help Wil Understand Cascading Style Sheets Which is One of the Last Things Online that Makes him Feel Stupid are all reminders that I was once a geek with copious amounts of time that I could spend visiting other worlds and teaching myself ways to do cool things on the Internets right here in my own, real world.

There was once a time when I'd spend an entire day banging away on my Website (via ssh, using vi on the server, natch) in an effort to earn it the W3C stamp of approval (yeah, that never happened.) There was even a time when I worked on writing a script that would detect your browser and display the page accordingly. This was for the seventeen people in the world who use text-based browsers. But time ran out, and honestly, why waste it trying to earn merit badges, when I can actually be, you know, writing the content that people come to the damn Website to read?

I once wanted a flying car, because . . . well, duh. It's a flying car. But then I started thinking about the realities of ownership: though I'd appreciate flying above the ever-increasing number of complete morons who think it's entirely safe and reasonable to weave across two lanes and go 40 because they're fucking text messaging someone, I'd also get to my destinations so quickly, that I'd somehow be expected to cram even more of them into a day.

I practically live on the Internets, and I support my family in ways that weren't possible before all this great technology existed. I don't have to leave my house for work if I don't want to, and for that I am deeply grateful . . . but when I don't get to spend more than an hour at a time with my kids because of my workload (which I've taken on, by the way, to provide for them) it makes me more than a little bit sad. I'd give just about anything to have more time to spend with them, but it looks like the magical time-saving technology which those cartoons of the 60s promised to deliver remains in the mysterious future.

Of course, I could be looking at this the wrong way. Maybe technology really has given us more time, but it has also made so much more stuff available to us, in the form of global online communities like we have here at SuicideGirls or Fark, social news sites like Netscape or Digg, and ever-updating subscriptions in Bloglines or NetNewsWire, that our time fills up unless we actively use technology to manage it. The problem isn't with technology, then, but with discipline. I think this is one of the principles behind Getting Things Done.

So though the holidays have passed, and I didn't get that extra time I wanted for Christmas, I can utilize another silly holiday tradition, and make a New Year's resolution to find and better manage time for myself and my family.

After work, I can turn off the cellphone, close up the laptop, check e-mail once or twice in an evening instead of once or twice an hour (maybe even not at all,) and wait until the following morning to send responses. I can block off hours in the day -- or even entire days themselves -- to spend with my wife and kids, or even by myself with one of those books (and not playing Vice City Stories on my PSP, or trying to do some whizbang bullshit with the HTML markup for my blog, just because it's there.) It's just a matter of discipline, so I own the technology, and not the other way around.

In fact, this column gives me an idea for a Sci-Fi story: what would happen if over-worked people, desperate to find some free time, took vacations in some alternate reality, where one day of vacation was actually one hour in their real world? What would the consequences of that be, and how would it affect their lives when they got back? Maybe I'll write it . . . if I can just find the time.

Wil Wheaton doesn't have time to come up with a clever byline this week.

web address: http://suicidegirls.com/news/geek/19797/Wil-Wheatons-Geek-in-Review-Time-Enough-At-Last/