Your Guide To Wasting Time on the Internet

At 10 AM I had my morning cup of coffee and a bowl of oatmeal, read the day’s news on CNN.com, and decided that I would write a post for collegecandy.com about the best websites for procrastinating.

Cut to eight hours later: I’ve clocked about four hours of Internet browsing time and haven’t gotten any of my post for College Candy done. This is because I am an expert on using the web to waste copious amounts of time.

Here’s how I do it.

My top 5 websites for wasting time:

1. Wikipedia

I spent the summer after my junior year at Emerson working as a receptionist at a post-production office in Los Angeles. We rarely had guests and the phone only rang a few times a day, so aside from picking up people’s lunches I didn’t have much to do. Instead of doing what I should have done (using the time to write a novel or a screenplay or whatever) I decided to learn all human knowledge on Wikipedia.org. I would spend hours clicking on “Random article” again and again. I am now a master at Trivial Pursuit.

2. Facebook

This one is pretty obvious but I feel it deserves to be at the top of my list since I waste so much time on it everyday. I obsessively check Facebook. I’m not exactly sure why. I get just a handful of notices every day about new friends or events, and I don’t actually spend that much time reading other people’s profiles, but it’s the News Feed that sucks me in. I’m not sure what I’m waiting to read, but I find myself checking it again and again, just in case some crazy shit in the life of a friend went down.

3. I-Am-Bored.com

This is another website that got me through months of being a very bored intern. I-Am-Bored.com has funny videos, photos, some news, but what gets me are the quizzes. Hundred and hundreds of quizzes. There’s everything from a state capitol quiz to quizzes based on real psychological profiles to see if and what mental disorder you have (I am mildly OCD with just a dash of schizophrenic).

4. The Sartorialist, Face Hunter, etc.

It’s amazing how many hours can go by while you’re scanning through pictures of drunk people or chic French people or chic drunk French people. Websites like lastnightsparty.com have buckets of new photos everyday of hipsters partying in New York and LA, and websites like facehunter.blogspot.com and thesartorialist.blogspot.com are loaded with photos of fashionable folk (both famous and non-famous) from all across the land (mainly Europe) to make you wish you could pull off a parka paired with knee socks or party with Agyness Deyn.

5. MyHeritage.com

Upload a photo of your face and some nifty face recognition software at myheritage.com will spit out what celebrities you look like. I am quite similar to Amanda Peet, Rachel Bilson, and Stanislav Lanevski, some Hungarian actor from “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.” Do it for yourself, then do it to all your ex-boyfriends (thank god for all those photo albums on Facebook!).

Got any other procrastination recommendations?