Top 10 procrastination websites

Will Tucker gives his favourite internet avenues

1. Facebook

The daddy of procrastination websites, Facebook is easy to pop onto for seconds to check notifications (it’s 1am and you checked it five minutes ago, didn’t you?) or spend hours on end arguing the toss with trolls you know you should avoid, or looking up people you barely know. Someone’s posted something ignorant about the Crimea crisis! Someone you haven’t spoken to since Year Eleven had a ‘mental night out’ in Plymouth and has posted all about it! You are doing no work this evening.

2. Twitter

If Facebook is a lairy common room, Twitter is more like a focus group from hell. People you know even less well than on Facebook tweet about going shopping or what they had for breakfast, but because influential people use the service, it gives it a veneer of respectability that makes people overextend themselves. ‘@barackobama LOL Putin’s made u look like a dick! #crimea’ You have 140 characters and four essays not to write.

3. Buzzfeed

A website seemingly designed for procrastination, Buzzfeed combines glaringly obvious ‘no way! Me too!’ articles like ’26 things all ‘90s kids can remember’ with inane quizzes – ‘which member of Liverpool’s 1996 FA Cup Final team are you?’ – and sexualised clickbait like ‘64 facts you never knew about boobs’, and then links them all together for a multi-tab procrastination nightmare. I may have made those articles up, but they sound likely (I got Robbie Fowler, by the way).

4. BBC

The lovingly ‘neutral’ (read: totally craven to whoever’s in power) Beeb maintains its own cavernous website where you can find literally anything you ever wanted to know, all in a sort of vaguely PG environment where people use ‘extreme sexual swear words’ and you are expected to work those out for yourself. Beloved of blaggers who think a skim-read of the News will make them sound knowledgeable about current affairs, football geeks (guilty) who can’t resist the latest League Two team news, and people just trying to find the TV guide, the BBC has it all, and I haven’t even mentioned iPlayer.

5. The Guardian 

In the interests of balance, this could also be ‘The Telegraph’ if you’re that way inclined. The broadsheet websites offer long reads, polemical opinions, things that sound like you should know about them but aren’t that important, things that sound not that important but you should know about, and ‘intellectual’ sports coverage. All of which takes up loads of time.

6. UsVsThem

This one is openly biased to the left (I couldn’t find a website called ‘1% Games’) but has a number of daft flash games, from ‘You Can’t Do Simple Maths Under Pressure’, to ‘Learn Typing With Ed Balls’ (no prizes for guessing what you have to type), and best of all ‘Super Tory Boy’, where you become a Mario-style Cameron, Osborne or Boris and take on a platform-based level of gold coins, privatised hospitals and benefit scroungers, to an 8-bit backing of ‘Land of Hope and Glory’.

7. Wikipedia

You start off on Wikipedia with the best of intentions. Perhaps you need to find out the population of Nigeria, or who the Italian Foreign Minister is. But something catches your eye, and three hours later you’re reading about the Peruvian presidential election of 1899 and what became of The Ghost Frequency, it’s midnight, you’ve done no work and your hot chocolate is room temperature.

8. Netflix

Netflix is a wonderful invention, but the way the episodes of whatever you’re watching run on from each other is surely the work of the devil. One moment you’re just watching the one episode of Breaking Bad or House of Cards over lunch/dinner and the next it’s 1am, you’ve got emotional at the ending of the half a series you’ve watched in one sitting and your essays are more unfinished than the first Babyshambles record.

9. YouTube

Possibly the pioneer of the alluring ‘related’ function that both Buzzfeed and Netflix have since copied, YouTube is the go-to place for obscure live performances (I don’t know how many times I’ve watched a six-month-old video of Liam Gallagher still miraculously being able to sing ‘Live Forever’) and comedy clips, varying from a forum-weapon to a whole episode in length. For me, this means ‘just five minutes’ watching a clip from Family Guy or The Thick of It soon balloons into enough ‘related videos’ that I might as well have watched a whole episode.

10. The Boar

I appreciate this is a bit of a Meta choice, but bear with me here. Not only does the Student Publication of the Year 2013 ™ have an excellent website with endless articles (just today I read about today’s racist swans and a five-year-old bomb scare that turned out to be bowls of rice), it of course provides excellent procrastination opportunities, some of which turn out to actually be articles about procrastination. See what I did there?