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. Read More »

Procrastination is always something I’ve been really good at.

Now that You Tube has made a permanent mark in all of our lives, procrastination has been easier than ever, making useful hours fly by and turn into a waste of clips and videos.

One professor at Pitzer College is trying to change this.

Alexandra Juhasz is a media studies professor at the liberal arts college, and is teaching a course on the usefulness and the phenomenon of You Tube.

As someone who spends a lot of time on the website, I have yet to find its inherent “usefulness” but I’m hoping Ms. Juhasz and her students let us all know what they come up with.

Of course we all saw how wonderfully effective the You Tube debates were, and how insightful the user questions were.

The idea is good and the intention is nice. But really those of us who sit on You Tube all day watching our favorite clips from “Family Guy,” maintain that the site’s usefulness lies in the fact that it’s completely useless. Read More »