I decided to see what life was like with no television or video games so for the past two weeks I haven't watched any TV during weekdays. The DVR is great for this because you can go a whole week and not feel like you have really given up anything.
My morning routine changed from waking up, making coffee, and sipping it while I watched whatever had collected on my DVR from last night to sipping on my coffee while sitting at the computer. Throughout the rest of the week most of the time that would have been spent watching television was spent reading, cleaning, calling friends or going out into the world and doing something. I rarely thought about watching TV or missed it. I did look forward to the weekend more than normal though. When I got to the weekend, I felt a lot less guilty about spending much of the day watching movies, TV, and playing video games.
I'm not sure if I will continue the no television on weekdays but one thing has changed permanently. When faced with watching all the shows stored on the DVR, a lot of the shows no longer interested me. Some of the shows I was very excited about watching and viewed those first. The further down the list the less excited I was to see certain shows until I ended up deleting a good portion without viewing them. Many reality shows were on this delete without watching list. In retrospect I was watching shows I didn't really like. I was just using them to kill time. Since I found other things to do with my time those were of no use to me anymore.
I am going to take a lot of things off auto record now, so even if I go back to watching TV throughout the week, I'm sure I'll be watching a lot less of it. Before this I was watching 14.25 hours a week or about 2 hours a day. After this I guessing it is going to be more around 3.5 hours a week.