Website Challenges Visitors to Do Nothing




We’ve found it: the perfect weekend activity. Here’s a website that doesn’t want you to do anything. That’s right, nothing.

This simple site, Do Nothing for Two Minutes, challenges you to do just that — nothing — and if you touch your mouse or keyboard during the countdown, you’re greeted with a “Fail” message.

We would suggest Do Nothing for 2 Minutes creator Alex Tew and developer Ben Dowling add a motion-sensing webcam to the mix, so the only way to pass this challenging test would be to remain still, barely breathing.

According to TechCrunch, Tew said,

“I had been thinking how we spend every waking minute of the day with access to an unlimited supply of information, to the point of information overload. i also read somewhere that there is evidence that our brains are being re-wired by the internet, because we get a little dopamine kick every time we check our e-mail or Twitter or Facebook and there’s a new update. So we’re all developing a bit of ADD. which is probably not great in terms of being productive.”

Who is this guy, anyway? You might remember Alex Tew from 2005, when he convinced visitors to his Million Dollar Home Page to buy pixels on a million-pixel graphic for $1 apiece. It was a huge hit, bringing in $1,037,100 to help pay for his college education.

His follow-ons haven’t been nearly as successful, including a lotto scheme called Pixelotto, PopJam, originally a social media humor site that’s now taken a turn toward becoming a ChatRoullette-style site, SockandAwe where visitors could throw a shoe at George W. Bush, and OneMillionPeople, where visitors submit their photos for free, with the goal of gathering a million “faces of a digital generation” into a 1,250-page coffee-table book of the photos. Tew hopes to sell that book for $100 per copy, as well as sell sponsorships for each page online.

For all his trouble, he was called “the most annoying man on the Internet” by the Daily Telegraph.

Perhaps to soothe his soul, Tew is focusing on a more Zen-like approach with his new do-nothing site. From the looks of it, it’s picking up some momentum, but there’s no monetization scheme involved with this one that we can see — just pure relaxation.

As you can see in the graphic above, I succeeded in doing nothing for the full two minutes. Sorry, boss. No ADD here. I’m not alone — there are already 27,000 Facebook user who like this.

Come on, high-powered, driven people. It’s the weekend; time to give yourself a time out. Go ahead, take a couple of minutes, listen to the relaxing sounds of the ocean and just do nothing. It might do you some good.

How about it, readers? Did you pass the test?

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