Not all time wasting sites are attention black holes

Once upon a time, there were two friends named Procrastination and Internet.

They liked… Once upon a time, there were two friends named Procrastination and Internet.

They liked holding hands and skipping through fields of wildflower jigsaw puzzles and cute puppy videos. They spent hours exploring each other’s interests and passions.Internet always knew just where Procrastination wanted to go.

One day while on a walk, they Stumbled and fell into a great dark hole. On the other side existed a world — sometimes funny, sometimes dark and sinister — where friends called Pages showed them things of which they could never have dreamed.

The end.

That happily distorted picture, my friends, is more than likely your night in the Hillman Library — fueled by free coffee and deadline-induced adrenaline.

Oh, you promised yourself you’d work for real. Maybe you even downloaded one of those nifty temporary site blockers — keepmeout.com/en/ — so social networking wouldn’t distract you. But here’s what no one ever tells you: Even helpful sites have a dark side.

Their educational nature makes them seem innocuous. Much like cute furry animals that could kill you, these study aids might derail you.

The creators of TED (Technology, Education and Design) trumpet the site as being full of “ideas worth spreading.” And they are, except that one video leads to another. Unlike YouTube videos, which lean toward the shorter side, one video on TED might cost you nearly 20 minutes.

So what if you were supposed to write a 10-page paper on the consequences of standardizing the grade school system in the U.S.?

Sure, you might glean something from creativity expert Ken Robinson’s chat “Do schools kill creativity?” But then you can’t help but watch Tinkering School founder Gever Tulley talk about “5 dangerous things you should let you kids do” — followed by a heated debate with your tablemate about “How young is too young to play with knives?”

Even sites like merriam-webster.com try to get your laser-focused concentration train to jump the tracks.

Start looking up synonyms for “good” and soon you’re offered a procrastination buffet. On the front page alone, there are countless time wasters: vocabulary quizzes, trend watches, popularity lists, words of the day, etc.

And you’ll tell yourself it’s OK because you’re “learning.” No matter if that hour spent acquainting yourself with 16th century insults is applicable, you bettered yourself with education, dammit.

But there’s an upside: The sites you thought could only waste your time might actually help you with work.

Twitter probably seems like Satan’s playpen when you’re trying to do work. It’s full of hilarious one-liners, and you think you’ll stop in five minutes — until you’re suddenly six months back on Kim Kardashian’s tweets wondering how you became this kind of person.

But scrolling through Twitter doesn’t have to lead to bouts of self-loathing as you stalk your celebrity obsession. There’s a light at the end of the tunnel, and that light is that people don’t only force their uneducated politics on you or share pictures of their dog in a Santa suit on Twitter. They also share important things.

We often think of hashtags as amusement. For example, yesterday, #thedreamer was trending. That probably won’t help write your term paper.

But using hashtags as a topic search for paper topics, such as #arabspring, will definitely yield helpful results. More than likely, you won’t get bogged down with too many inane comments. And, unlike many search tools, the 140-character limit makes filtering easier — not enough room for crazies to go on tangents.

Tweets themselves are rarely helpful — but the links posted with them can often have information that would have been difficult to find in a Google search.

The same can be true for Facebook. Those politically charged friends who drive you crazy half the year by bombarding your newsfeed with indignant posts and links to articles? They might come in handy — whether you use a link they’ve posted or ask them where you might find more information.

Even StumbleUpon, for all its time-wasting potential, allows you to set parameters so that your casual stumbling is more likely to yield helpful pages.

Of course, there’s no substitute for will power. Virtually anything — iTunes, study buddies, walls — can distract you from tasks if you want to be distracted. But maybe halfway through Kim’s tweets you’ll be inspired to get back on track and search for your topic.