The 20 Best Sites for Wasting Time on the Internet

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There's a lot of content out there about productivity -- everything from hacks to shortcuts to tips and tricks for how to get more done in less time. It's all about the sprint, the checking things off the lists as quickly as possible, and the downloading of software that'll block out any and all distractions.

But what about those times when you just want to surf the internet aimlessly? Hey, no one can be totally productive all the time. In fact, studies have shown that taking deliberate breaks after periods of work is better for productivity.

The question is, how do you spend those breaks? You could check your email, but that still counts as working. You could check Facebook or Twitter or Instagram, but there's something so mundane about haphazardly scrolling through your peripheral friends' photos.

We have a few better ideas. Here's a shortlist of the most wonderfully entertaining places to waste time on the internet outside of email and social media. Get ready to bookmark your favorites.

20 of the Best Sites For Wasting Time on the Internet

1) WaitButWhy

WaitButWhy is one of my favorite places to spend time on the internet. Every week or so, a guy named Tim Urban churns out one, really long, really awesome article. (Seriously, they're canonical. You can kill a lot of time reading just one of them.)

His articles are always fascinating, in-depth, and really well written. His writing style is the perfect mix of informative and humorous -- making topics like the Fermi Paradox (the what?) approachable for someone like me who'd never heard of it before in my entire life. He writes about relationships, religion, outer space ... pretty much everything.

My favorite posts of his include "Everything You Don't Know About Tipping," "The Great Perils of Social Interaction,"  and "Your Life in Week" (which has some awesome graphics in it, by the way). He even wrote a great post on why procrastinators procrastinate, which anyone reading this article might want to check out.

2) Sense-Lang's Balloon Typing Game

Image Credit: Mashable

Hey, it's not a total waste of time if you're practicing your typing skills, right? I've spent way too much time playing online typing games and trying to beat my words-per-minute records. There are a lot of typing games out there, but Sense-Lang's Balloon Typing Game is one of the simplest. Balloons with letters on them float down your screen, and your job is to burst them by hitting the right key before they reach the bottom. If you're looking for more of a challenge, check out their car racing game.

3) Mental Floss

Mental Floss is a super addicting online magazine with articles covering a really wide range of topics. Their articles are really well written, really well researched, and usually on topics that don't get a lot of airtime.

For example, in their "Big Questions" section, they tackle weirdly intriguing questions like why shells sound like the ocean and why yawns are contagious. Readers can even submit their own big questions.

Not to mention, I love the way they describe themselves -- it's quite fitting:

mental_floss magazine is an intelligent read, but not too intelligent. We're the sort of intelligent that you hang out with for a while, enjoy our company, laugh a little, smile a lot and then we part ways. Great times. And you only realize how much you learned from us after a little while.

Like a couple days later when you're impressing your friends with all these intriguing facts and things you picked up from us, and they ask you how you know so much, and you think back on that great afternoon you spent with us and you smile.

And then you lie and say you read a lot.

4) xkcd

If you're into nerdy humor even the littlest, tiniest bit, there's a lot to love about xkcd. Each post features a short, stick-figure comic strip on humor about technology, science, mathematics, and relationships. The guy behind it is Randall Munroe, who worked on robots at NASA's Langley Research Center in Virginia before starting this blog.

Below is an example of one of his comic strips. (He always includes a joke in the comic strip image's alt text, so if you look at the strips on the xkcd website, be sure to hover your mouse over the image to catch those jokes.)

Image Credit: xkcd

5) The Oatmeal

The Oatmeal is another one of my absolute favorite places to spend time online. It's a huge library of awesome content -- some comprised entirely of graphics. Even if you've read everything already, it's the kind of stuff you can read over and over again.

Some of my favorite posts include "Why Working From Home is Both Awesome and Horrible," "How the Male Angler Fish Got Completely Screwed" (I think I legitimately cried laughing when I first read that one), and a whole manner of grammar-related posts like "Ten Words You Need to Stop Misspelling" and "How and Why to Use 'Whom' in a Sentence."

6) Supercook

If you want to surf the internet in a semi-productive way -- but not so productive that you actually have to leave the house -- then check out Supercook.

Here's how it works: You tell it which ingredients you have in stock in your home, and it'll give you a big list of recipes you can make using just those ingredients. It's a fun way to stay thrifty, clean out the fridge, and make sure food doesn't go to waste.

7) BuzzFeed "Comments" Sections

You already know BuzzFeed is a great place to waste time on the internet, but we're looking beyond the actual article here.

Scroll down to the comments section of any article for a wildly entertaining showcase of the crazy stuff people are saying. It's especially entertaining to read the comments under seemingly benign topics that shouldn't make people irate, but do anyway.

8) The Toast

If you're into great (and hilarious) fiction writing, then you'll definitely want to bookmark this site. Every day, writers Nicole Cliffe and Mallory Ortberg publish a post on "everything from literary characters that never were to female pickpockets of Gold Rush-era San Francisco."

To get an idea of whether it's up your alley, then read their post "A Day in the Life of Seth MacFarlane, Human Male (Definitely Not a Swarm of Hyper-Alert Bees and a Metal Jaw.)" (It's just so good.)

9) Baby Animal Cams

Puppies. Kittens. Chicks. Sea otters. I have this website bookmarked for whenever I need a pick-me-up. You can search for the species you want to watch, and then check out a stream from houses, shelters, and aquariums in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. I've spent some quality time fawning over these golden retriever puppies.

10) Zillow

It's fun to check out real estate in areas you might want to live -- and it's just as fun to check it out in places you'll probably never live (but would love to in a dream world). Go ahead and explore what's out there. You can set up saved searches -- some more realistic than others -- to relive your discoveries later.

11) Google Maps Street View

In the same vein as Zillow, it's wildly entertaining to go to Google Maps and zoom in on the street view in random places around the world. It's so strange and thrilling to see what life was like at a random moment in time, on a random street somewhere you may never visit in your lifetime.

I recommend the Palace of Versailles in France, Mount Everest Base Camp in Nepal, the Swiss Alps, and the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Australia (yes, they have underwater cameras.)

12) HowStuffWorks

This website is dedicated entirely to -- you guessed it -- how things work. And by "things," they mean everything -- from airbags to regenerative medicine to velocipede carousels. They've covered so much on this website, it'll be hard to run out of things to read about. 

Plus, they have a whole bunch of really cool podcasts that have branched off the main site over the years and are worth checking out, like "Stuff You Should Know," "BrainStuff," and "Stuff Mom Never Told You."

13) The Onion

If you haven't spent some quality time reading the online satirical newspaper The Onion, then you're seriously missing out on a good laugh. (And you've kind of been living under a rock.) But seriously, I sometimes forget how consistently hysterical the articles are.

The publication started in 1988 and they've managed to successfully maintain a high standard for humor and writing ever since. Their headlines are laugh-out-loud funny in and of themselves -- from "Free-Thinking Cat Sh**s Outside the Box" to "Archaeological Dig Uncovers Ancient Race of Skeleton People" to "Find the Thing You're Most Passionate About, Then Do It On Nights and Weekends For the Rest of Your Life."

Of course, their headlines being hilarious makes sense, seeing as the headline is where each story begins. This awesome episode of NPR's This American Life gives you a really cool peek into The Onion's editorial process. 

(Bonus: ClickHole, their sister website that makes fun of Upworthy-style viral content on the internet, is another great place to waste some time.)

14) Wikipedia

You didn't think I'd write a post on where to waste time on the internet without including Wikipedia, did you? Of course not. You've gotta love spiraling into the proverbial Wikipedia black hole: Look up one thing, and then check out something that's interlinked to it. Before you know it, you'll have charted the entire Russian Revolution. (An actual glimpse into my colleague Corey's Sunday morning.)

If you want to get more involved while wasting time online, remember Wikipedia is based on a model of openly editable content -- as in, anyone can edit any unprotected page. So if you're into editing and updating content in your free time, it's yours to edit. (As long as you follow their guidelines.)

15) OCEARCH Shark Tracker

Tracking sharks as they swim around the ocean may not be the most conventional way to waste time on the internet ... but it might be the coolest.

The Track Sharker tool by Marine Research Group OCEARCH lets you track tagged sharks -- who all have names, by the way -- as they travel all over the world. You can even zoom in to a specific location to see which sharks are hanging out there and where they've been swimming and traveling for the past year. Go, Leviticus, go!

16) Giphy

When you need to find the perfect GIF, you can't just stop at the first result you get for "dancing" or "awkward" or "animals being jerks." I could spend (... and have spent) hours on Giphy looking for juuust the right GIF. How long do you think it took my colleague Niti to come up with all ten of the ones in this post? WORTH IT.

17) Way Back Machine

Feeling nostalgic? Check out what websites have looked like over the years via Internet Archive's famous Way Back Machine. It lets you pick a date and see exactly what the website looked like at that time. 

(If you want to take just a quick look, here's a roundup of what 9 famous websites used to look like. The images were all taken from the Way Back Machine.)

18) Apartment Therapy

If you're even a little bit of a fan of home decor or DIY projects, this is a website you might find yourself spending hours and hours on. There's a ton of awesome visual and written content on here. My favorites include their "before and after" series, their "small spaces" series, and the tours of people's actual apartments and homes.

Plus, they have a ton of helpful articles giving tips on everything from how to redo your stairs to ideas for using that awkward space above your fridge. There's no shortage of useful and fun information on here, making it prime for endless browsing.

19) Lifehacker

Lifehacker is a hub of productivity tips, tricks, and downloads. It's basically an archive of all the information it would be incredibly useful to know, but nobody every really teaches you. Aside from productivity, they also cover topics such as money-saving tips, clever uses for household items, and so on.

For example, did you know you can buy alcoholic beverages at Costco without a membership? Or that you can peel a mango in under 10 seconds? Or that there are four lengths of naps that'll benefit you in different, very specific ways? Along with the fun articles, they have some pretty awesome, in-depth articles, like this one on how to plant ideas in someone's mind, as well as helpful listicles like the top ten obscure Google Search tricks.

There's so much content on there that it can be hard to find posts on specific topics. Use the Lifehacker Index for an introduction to their top-performing posts and tips on how to find posts on any topic on the website.

20) The Oregon Trail

Here's a little gift for those of you who made it to the end of this post: Internet Archive -- yes, the same one responsible for the Way Back Machine -- made it possible for people to PLAY THE COMPUTER GAME "OREGON TRAIL" AGAIN. I can practically hear all the Gen X'ers out there screaming with joy.

If "Oregon Trail" isn't your cup of tea, the other games made available by Internet Archive include "Duke Nukem," "Street Fighter," "Burger Blaster," "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade," "The Lion King," and "Chuck Yeager's Advanced Flight Trainer." Check out the full library here.

What are your favorite websites for wasting time on the internet? Share with us in the comments.