I just found this out today, but it is TV-Turnoff Week. In the past few years, this is something I have begun to believe in more and more. I do own a TV set, but it is in a box in storage. The only time it comes out is for the first two days of the NCAA basketball tournament (the two greatest sports days of the year). When I am at home I watch no TV. When I am on the road I only watch a little Sportcenter to fall a sleep to and Law&Order when I am on vacation. Other than that, it is no TV for me.
I was recently reflecting on the fact I didn’t watch TV at home and realized that at no point in the last year did I feel board, or that I had nothing to do. I have managed to fill my time other activities, never missing the TV.
Every morning I read Michael Masterson’s web page Early to Rise. On Monday he had two more reason to turn off the TV.
If you work eight hours a day five days a week, that is about 2000 hours a year.
A study of 1,300 children that was published in Pediatrics found that those who were frequent TV watchers were most likely to be impulsive and restless and to have concentration problems. Every added hour of watching television increased a child’s odds of having attention problems by about 10%. And those who watched three hours a day were 30% more likely to have trouble focusing than those who watched no TV.
Consider this: If success is 90% persistence and persistence is largely the ability to stay focused over time, how successful will your children be if their TV-watching habits render them functionally incapable of concentrating?
Think about what you could accomplish if you were to devote 200 eight-hour days to, say, learning a foreign language.