Recently deleted Instagram, Reddit and disabled YouTube shorts. I now noticed how much I miss doing something — like when sitting in the train or during breaks at work.
So what do you do with your idle time? Any suggestions?
For long drives/commutes I love listening to podcasts, banter/discussion-heavy streams, or audio books. Also love a bit of karaoke in the car.
If I’m at home, I’d often get into something for bit. Maybe try a new game for a week or two before I grow bored or maybe try out a niche hobby for a while like figurine painting.
I’m not the type to do much productive things at home so my main hobbies are usually outside. Golf, kendo, gym, bouldering - anything that I can sink time into and gradually get better and meet new people is my jam. I also spend the idle time at work or at home learning or researching more on the hobbies I enjoy.
I’d recommend giving audio books a try. There’s so much to choose from and you can find whatever book to match your mood at the time.
I have so much Idle time during my commute, that I picked up duolingo to learn spanish. If that is too much I tend to just listen to audiobooks/a d&d podcast
I’m on android so I used ReVanced, though I recently deleted the YouTube app and installed LibreTube which has no YouTube algorithm and no shorts tab. (I use the IzzyOnDroid repo with F-Droid)
Libretube is fine but it crashed a lot on my phone i’m now using" newpipe xsponsorblock" it took me a long time to import all my subscriptions but it works really great. The only alternative I would considered is freetube for android
There is a critical bug in the F-droid release, but the maintainers seem to have a bit of an internal conflict about publishing the app on F-Droid, the IzzyOnDroid/GitHub release is pretty stable.
You might be interested in Clozemaster for language learning. It has collections of most frequent words where you get a sentence with a word missing that you have to input. That way you just get blasted with hundreds and thousands of sentences in your target language.
I follow the daily best posts on hacker news hnrss.github.io
This exposes me to quite interesting blogs (mainly tech, but not always). If I find someone worth following, I’ll add their blog to my list as well. That’s how I’ve been building my RSS feeds over the years.
From the non tech blogs that I’ve found there, from the top of my head, these are nice
going-medieval.com - medieval history professor’s blog. She’s quite witty, and makes super interesting posts about the daily lifes of people in the middle ages.
brr.fyi - blog from an IT guy working in a scientific research center in Antarctica.
IMHO handhelds are truly a gem to be kept, and until streaming gaming (appears to be “the future”) is widely available for everyone we are better with the retro gaming community.
Honorable mention to larger handhelds such as the Switch or the Steam Deck…
Basically just anything I can while waiting for time to pass. I can’t get deeper into something, because there’s not enough time. Usually that ends up being walking back and forth and thinking, having a fake conversation in my head.
like when sitting in the train
I don’t consider that idle time, but a fun activity. I often take a train or bus nowhere. That means, as far as I can go and back. Or try to make my commute as long as possible. For example, I found nice connections allowing me to extend my commute from school from just 18km to 133km, and it’s only €0.90 more expensive.
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