With midterms up the wazoo, I decided that I should go a week without Netflix, hoping that I would be more productive and could potentially read more. Here is what happened.
Day 1: The week started off on an excellent foot. I came home for dinner and immediately started watching Will & Grace. Technically this wasn’t Netflix because I had to watch it on NBC Go, but I felt like I was still cheating.
Day 2: This week was not going well. I was struggling trying to do my physics homework and made myself feel better by watching Dancing With the Stars (also not on Netflix so technically it was fine).
I decided that in order to do this week without Netflix accurately, it should be a week without streaming or my guilty pleasure, YouTube beauty tutorials. So I started a new week and dubbed it My Week Without Netflix 2.0. This time, I only cheated once when I went to work and streamed Miss Congeniality. People are always coming up to me when I’m at work, so it’s hard to get any homework done and it’s just easier to have some show playing mindlessly in the background.
Honestly, at the end of the week, I didn’t feel like I was more productive without streaming shows. If anything, I felt like I was less productive by spending waaayy more time scrolling through the depths of my explore page on Instagram or my newsfeed on Facebook or constantly refreshing Snapchat stories. The one good thing that did come out of this week was I didn’t stream endless episodes before going to bed. I either went straight to bed or started reading before bed.
The takeaway: Everything in moderation. Sometimes you just need to keep yourself sane by taking a well-deserved break between homework assignments.