The Problem With TV and Movies

Last month I counted. Four nights in a row, my wife and I sat down to watch something, scrolled for over half an hour, and went to bed having watched nothing.

And this isn't a new thing.

Now don't get it twisted. We are entrepreneurs. That means we sometimes have a hard time winding down, and sometimes we work late. But finding something you want to watch with somebody is a modern-day problem — and I bet you've experienced the same thing in the past week.

Don't think so? Here are some facts:

The average American now spends 12 minutes per session just searching for something to watch, up from 7 minutes in 2019, according to Nielsen. Nearly one in five give up and do something else instead.

A 2024 survey of 2,000 US streaming subscribers put the total at 110 hours a year deciding what to watch. That is nearly five full days, spent on the sofa, not watching anything.

Almost half of streaming viewers, 49%, say they would cancel a service because they cannot find something to watch, and 66% want one guide that works across every service they pay for, per Nielsen's 2025 State of Play report.

This is not because there was nothing to watch. There are more movies and TV shows than ever. And between Netflix, Amazon Prime and Apple TV we have access to more good films than we could get through in a lifetime. (And then there are sports.) We went to bed because choosing had become too mentally draining…

That is the part nobody talks about. The problem with streaming is not too little choice or too much. It is that we walk into the choice with nothing prepared, at the exact hour of the day when we have the least to give. When you're mentally fatigued, that's when you have to have the laser sharpness to pick the right movie?

Open loops

There is an idea in David Allen's Getting Things Done that has stuck with me for years. Anything you have committed to, even loosely, and have not written down somewhere you trust, becomes an open loop. Your brain keeps a little process running to hold onto it.

One open loop is nothing. Two hundred of them is a low hum of stress you stop noticing because it never goes away. And then, you have people like us who work in a job or business that requires mentally thinking all the time.

Hot Take: The end of the day is the worst time to pick a movie to watch together.

Now think about how many films and shows you have half-committed to. The one your brother would not stop talking about. The documentary someone posted. The series you started, liked, and lost track of after episode three. The film you saw a trailer for in March. (Who was in that one again?)

Every one of those is an open loop. And unlike your work tasks, you never wrote any of them down, because they didn't feel important enough at the moment. In life, you can only have one focus at a time. For me, I find distractions very disruptive because I can see how ti takes me completely out of mentally demanding tasks. This is why I have a massive to-do list.

So these open loops sit there. And at 9pm, when you open Netflix, your brain tries to retrieve all of them at once and comes back with nothing. “I know there was something I wanted to watch. . .” That sentence is the sound of two hundred open loops failing at the same time.

Why the scroll makes it worse

The infinite scroll is designed for the platform, not for you.

Facebook does this. Instagram does this. Reddit does this. YouTube also.

Netflix doesn't know what your brother recommended. It knows what it wants to promote this week and what people vaguely like you clicked on. They have a financial model that encourages everybody talking over the water cooler about the new Netflix-exclusive show. So every row it shows you is a fresh set of decisions, none of which you asked for, all of which you now have to evaluate.

Thirty minutes of that is not browsing. It is thirty minutes of low-grade decision-making with no memory and no criteria. Of course, you end up rewatching The Office or another re-run of Schitt's Creek. It's the only option that doesn't require a decision.

Keep in mind, this is not a willpower problem. Nobody has good judgment at 9pm after a full day spent juggling infinite mental possibilities. The fix is not to try harder in the moment. The fix is to have done the deciding earlier, somewhere you can trust.

What I tried first

I tried a note on my phone. This notes app,that one. A to-do list. Teux-Deux. Bear. Notion. You name it.

The note could hold titles, but that was all it could do. It didn't tell me which of those forty films were actually rated well. And it couldn't tell me which ones were streaming on a service I already pay for. It could not tell me which ones my wife would also like.

So the note became one more place to scroll, and I went back to the hum.

That is the lesson I keep relearning in every part of my life. A list you only half trust is a list you stop using. For a system to close the loop, it has to answer the question you will actually have when you come back to it.

For films, the question at 9pm is not “what have I saved?” It is “what should we watch tonight?” Those are very different questions.

What closing the loop looks like

Here is what changed things for us.

One list, for everything, from every service. If I hear about a film, it goes in. If we start a series, it goes in. The moment it is captured, my brain lets go of it. Peace.

Ratings next to every title. Not Netflix's percentage match, which is marketing. Rotten Tomatoes and IMDb, so I can see at a glance what is worth two hours. Higher reviews are a higher probability of a good film – but I take those with a grain of salt. But for me, it does help narrow that decision.

Where it is streaming right now, on the services we already pay for. Nothing that costs extra dressed up as “available.” Who needs that extra noise that a movie is “on” Amazon Prime but at an additional cost of $4.99 for the rental. There are always torrents and a good VPN.

And the one that surprised me most: my wife's list next to mine, with the overlap pulled out. Her picks, my picks, and in the middle the handful we both already said yes to. Most nights the choice is made in under a minute now, because we are choosing from three things instead of three thousand.

The result

I am not going to tell you it fixed our marriage or gave us back our youth. (Although when you both share a great movie together, it can feel cathartic.) But it did give us back the evening.

We sit down, open the list, filter for the kind of night it is, and press play. The half-hour scroll is gone. So is the “I know there was something” feeling, because there is nowhere for it to hide. If it mattered, it is on the list.

And the low hum I did not know I was carrying is quieter. Two hundred open loops, closed, for the cost of writing things down in a place that answers the right question.

If you want to try it

I built the tool I described above because I could not find one that did all of it without ads. It is called WatchlistBoosted, it is free, and it will stay free.

But the tool is the smaller part. The bigger part is the habit: when something catches your attention, capture it, once, in one place. Do the deciding while you still have the energy to decide. Batch tasks when it's best for you. Then let 9pm be easy.

You have enough open loops at work. Your evenings should not be adding to them.

Do you experience this? Drop a comment and let me know if this resonated with you and create a free account and start optimizing your Watch list.