Television.

Here’s the deal, most of everything that is on TV is total garbage, so don’t waste your time watching it at all. However, I realize that there are numerous shows that people are really invested in because they’ve spent time watching them for years. In this plan you’ll still be able to watch your favorite shows, and you’ll save yourself a ton of time. Three letters are here to save your life:

DVR, formerly known as VCR.

Either way you can save a ton of time by using these genius inventions. Here is how you will get a big chunk of your life back and never miss your favorite show.

1. Never watch any of your favorite shows live. Whether it be Lost, Idol, SYTYCD, 24, The Office, Jersey Shore, etc.

2. Watch them later in the evening and zip through the commercials in fast forward. You’ll save a ridiculous amount of time.

Let’s say you watch 2 shows religiously. They are both one hour dramas. A one hour drama actually only has 44 minutes of content, sometimes only 42, but we’ll be conservative here and say 44. If you watch the whole show live, you just spent 60 minutes watching a 44 minute show. If you do that twice a week (Lost and Heroes) then you just spent 120 minutes watching 88 minutes worth of television. If you could cut those commercials out, you would save 32 minutes a week. Extrapolate that out for a 20 episode season, and bam you just saved yourself over 10 hours! Ten hours of your life that you just got back. You could run 2 marathons in that time, or take a serious road trip, or watch 5 movies, or read a whole book, or write a whole bunch of blogs, or do something that involved someone else, you know, socializing.

Also the time you would have been watching TV in “prime time” can be spent hanging out with other people and investing yourself in your friends, family, or anyone else.

Now imagine if you watched 4 one hour shows. You just got 21 hours back! That’s a whole day.

So there you go, learn to use your DVR and you’ll live longer. Over 30 years, you’d get back a whole month. Who wouldn’t want an extra month of life?