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Comment by et-al | Hacker News Reader

As an aside, sometimes I wonder about how much more efficient we are today due to smartphones. Places where we've lost time:

- at the stoplight, the driver in front of you is too busy looking down to notice the light has changed

- in the bathroom, people check social media on the toilet

- on the sidewalk, folks walk slower because they're pre-occupied with texting

- meeting up with friends, it's more acceptable to be late because one can always send a last minute update, "I'll be there in 10 minutes!" (read: just got on lyft)

- even talking with people present: "Sorry, could you please repeat that? I was just responding to an email."

I know of digital detoxes (gag), but the inevitable seems to be this distracted-presence as our new reality (until we go full virtual-reality).

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If those people weren't reading news or playing games on the toilet, they would be reading shampoo bottles. In periods of downtime people need something to do and smartphones can make that time more effective (when not used to look at cats.)

But when you're done with the toilet it's easy to put down the shampoo bottle. It's easier still to sit there for another ten minutes on a page like tumblr or Facebook which endlessly scrolls.

> in the bathroom, people check social media on the toilet

I've always used the toilet breaks to read actual books or newspapers (except at work, where it would look funny carrying a book with me to the toilet), and I hope I'm not the only one still doing that. Otherwise you make very good points, never thought about it that way.

Agreed, plenty of us were wasting time on the toilet well before the invention of the smart phone.

Humans have a pretty infinite ability to fill time, and to always find something new they "should" be doing. Early household cleaning appliances like the vacuum sold on promises of freeing up housewife's time to do other things, but people spend just as long cleaning their houses now as they did pre vacuum.

We just sort of... do things, and it's very difficult to map the relationship between an object and its impact on how much time we spend interacting with it

I think you are spot on with the bathroom. It's unbelievable to me how much time people seem to spend in there now. The last two times I've arrived in SFO and went to the bathroom I had to wait for a stall I ended up waiting about 5 minutes till anyone came out of the stalls. Meanwhile you hear notification sounds coming out of some of them. Likewise at work some people disappear in the bathroom for close to 30 minutes. I am becoming more and more in favor of installing jammers in public bathrooms.

I think it's more about the lack of fiber. I used to take my gameboy or a newspaper with me until I changed my diet.

For a second there I wondered why anyone would have fiber glass internet specifically in their toilet, but not anywhere else.

> even talking with people present: "Sorry, could you please repeat that? I was just responding to an email."

'I'm sorry, I scheduled this meeting so that we could have a conversation. Let's reschedule for when your email-checking schedule is clear.'

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