I suppose that if we're supposed to be accomplishing something specific any time not devoted to the task is time "wasted", whether we've devoted it to something personally constructive or simply viewed NSFW web pages. But surely there are not only pleasurable, but also constructive, ways of wasting time. Often when I'm unsuccessfully trying to find the right way to word something I'll turn to a graphics program to crop or touch-up a photo, or perhaps add a layer of text. Often this is totally unnecessary, but it allows me to clear my thoughts a bit. At other times I'll "waste" at least twenty minutes on trying to get the HTML of something I'm working on "just right", though perhaps I'm the only person who'll notice what wasn't right. As with the graphics, this clears my thoughts. Both of these, and more, are far from truly wastes of time and perhaps only get classified as such because today we place such a large emphasis on "productive" labor.

These, however, are a different type of time wasting than clicking into an article three or four links down the line from the one we originally (for a "productive" reason, of course) clicked into. Rather than a "clearing our thoughts" waste of time, this one might be called a "collecting random thoughts" waste of time. And quite obviously, though there may be no immediate productive value in doing this, the fact that our clicking and reading have exposed us to a couple of ideas that we perhaps hadn't yet entertained which we've now filed away - perhaps digitally, perhaps on a slip a paper, and perhaps simply somewhere in our heads - ultimately makes them worthwhile (and thus not a "waste").