The 7 best ways to waste time on the internet

It’s official. Our obsession with the internet has Gone Too Far. Next month, an American professor has announced, he will begin teaching a class entitled “Wasting Time on the Internet”. From January 5, for three hours every week, 15 creative writing students at the University of Pennsylvania will sit silently in a room, with nothing more than their smartphones and a wifi connection. At the end of the term, the students will be expected to produce a project based on their thoughts and experiences during the session. “Aimless drifting” and “intuitive surfing”, Professor Kenneth Goldsmith says, “will be mandatory”. And you thought silly season was over.

Wasting time on the internet, it seems, has reached its peak. Of all the workplace distractions, the web is the greatest productivity drain of all – a third of employees worldwide admit to spending up to two hours a day pointlessly browsing online. Social media sites are the biggest time thieves – Tumblr eats up around half this time, while Twitter accounts for a fifth. What’s worse, the object of our distractions is only growing: more than 1.1 billion active Facebook users upload 350 million photos each day, while over 100 hours of video are added to YouTube every minute. The internet is, slowly but surely, taking over our lives.

So, with wasting time online now elevated to a lofty matter worthy of university study, we’ve rounded up the top seven ways to while away your days on the web. Warning: you may never do anything productive ever again…

1. Playing games on Google

Yes, that’s right, you don’t even have to leave the search engine page to watch hours of your life go down the drain. Google’s infamous “hidden features” include typing the following phrases into the search bar: “do a barrel roll” (for a quirky 360 degree spin); “tilt” (adjusting the angle of the screen) and “I’m feeling lucky” (for Google to take you directly to the webpage of the first result in the list of searches). The latter has led to a number of “Google bombs”, whereby searches are booby-trapped to give comic results. Try googling “French military victories” and pressing “I’m feeling lucky”.

2. Liking Facebook posts

An activity that’s come to replace face-to-face conversation, private messages and even the occasional wall-post, the Facebook thumbs up is the ultimate signifier of modern-day friendship. Why bother picking up the phone when you can just “like” your old classmate’s latest profile picture? Less intrusive than poking, there are occupational hazards, however, like the drunken slip-of-the-finger “like” of an ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend’s latest status update. Or the embarrassing relative whose seemingly endorsing your every virtual breath. Take it too far, and you could even end up like this guy.

3. Scrolling aimlessly through social media

There is no better late-night activity than trawling through the dregs of Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest to see what your followers have been up to. You’ll find things you never knew – or wanted – to discover: arty photographs of colleagues’ Christmas dinners overlaid by ridiculous filters, endless irritating vines of cute animals and catty exchanges between TOWIE celebs accused of stealing each others’ boyfriends. Problem is, it’s a bottomless pit. There is, quite literally, no end to the meaningless waffle of the web – and, once you start…

4. Google Earth and Street View

Somehow, looking up a bird’s eye view of your colleague’s house never gets old. Is that a swimming pool in the garden; a balcony; a mock Tudor thatched roof with wooden beams in the dining room? Recently, Street View has got in on the action, with its catalogue of caught-in-the-act burglars, smooching couples and people the world over doing things that they shouldn’t be seen doing on camera. Highlights include the flashmob outside Google HQ, an inflatable dolphin crashing into the roof of a house in Oxford and a monster spider the size of a bus in The Netherlands.

5. Watching cat videos on YouTube

From the mutant spider dog to the woman catcalled in NYC, there are endless, pointless videos available for free on the web. Obviously, the most compelling ones star cats – jumping on things, falling off things and generally looking unhappy with their lot. Whole afternoons can disappear into the void of YouTube, mostly (no) thanks to the irresistible allure of the “related content” tab. Technically speaking, some of the most popular aren’t even videos – they’re even more inane gifs, such as this one of a pug licking your computer screen. Just try to switch him off.

6. Timewasting games

From nickname generators to the notorious Cheese or Font (don’t pretend you’ve never tried it), the internet is a treasure trove of digital nonsense. You can test your knowledge of Monty Python with a quiz, save the world from a unicorn attack, draw stickmen, dress up as a Jedi, float a chicken across a raging stream, make pretty pictures out of falling sand – or even play this game, which counts the number of seconds you can stand the boredom of watching a timer tick up and up. Rather helpfully, some clever bods have even invented “Can’t You See I’m Busy”, a site specifically designed to disguise games as Excel or Word documents – so you look like you’re working hard when you’re quite clearly not.

7. Reading pointless articles about wasting time on the internet

Now this really is meta.