Spend less time scrolling and more time streaming with these 3 hacks

There is too much to watch and not enough time to watch it. With so many studios putting out new content at a rapid clip, there are way too many TV shows and movies to take in. There’s barely enough time to keep up with all the new weekly titles, let alone try to catch up on older shows you may have missed the first time around. And good luck if you never caught Mad Men or Lost and have been meaning to catch up; those seasons are a lot longer than the eight- or ten-episode seasons viewers are accustomed to today.

It’s hard to determine the exact number of shows that aired new seasons this past year, but this Entertainment Weekly article highlighted over 75 just for the fall alone — a number that seems pretty light, if you ask me. There were hundreds of films released in 2024 as well, and things become a lot more complicated when you start to consider all the non-fiction programming and international titles available out there.

With so many options, you need to be better at sorting through all of this and finding exactly what is worth watching. For 2025, it’s time to stop scrolling. Here’s how.

1 Curate lists on lists

Keep track of everything you want to watch in one place

Every streaming service has a watch list, but all the different apps mean it’s not easy to track everything all at once. These features are pretty lacking too; they aren’t sortable and, in most cases, you only get one single watchlist. That’s not ideal when you have a number of varied interests that will be informed by your mood. So, you need to start your own list. Whether you create some kind of Google Sheet, opt for an app like JustWatch, or just get a pen and paper, you need to curate a single list of all the shows, movies, specials, and series you think you want to watch at some point in your life.

One big list is a good start, but you need to be able to sort titles, or have smaller lists available. You’re not going to be in the mood to watch everything at any given point, and some movies, like Oscar nominations, might want to be viewed in a more timely fashion than others. You need a way to quickly and easily filter out parts of the lists so you’re not just scrolling on some other plane of existence. Even if you just create two lists, one for mindful engagement and one for mindless viewing, you’re off to a great start.

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2 Develop a system for choosing titles

Seek assistance for a final decision

Once you have a more organized grasp on all the things you might want to watch, you need a way to determine what’s actually going on the TV at that very moment. It’s not enough to have a bunch of lists if you’re just going to be scrolling through that list instead. So, how do you pick what you’re going to watch?

The best and easiest way, I think, is to decide at random. Or rather, let a system decide at random for you. You’ll want that list to be filtered in some way, whether it’s by genre or year or Timothée Chalamet. From there, you need a mechanism to make the final impartial pick. Whether that’s a random number generator, spinning a wheel, or rolling a die, figure out a way for an operation to select from your list so that you don’t have to. The important thing is to abide by the decision. If you start to bicker with the thing that’s making the final pick, you’ll just end up scrolling all over again.

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3 Cull your streaming subscriptions

Limit your options amid rising costs

One way to make life easier is by simply cutting off extraneous streamers. Services are increasingly expensive, and with the introduction of more ads, they’re also becoming increasingly annoying. It can be a lot to juggle and to justify if you’re not able to keep up with all the influx of shows coming in.

Unsubscribing not only saves you money, but it also helps to limit your catalog of content that’s available to watch. It can be especially helpful when you are still considering titles available on free services, such as Hoopla or Kanopy; narrowing down your options can go a long way to helping you spend more time watching and less time scrolling.

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It’s not going to be an easy task — some might even say it’s a daunting one — and while there may be some comfort in cycling through carousels to see almost everything that’s available, you need to be more efficient if you want to get the most out of your streaming services. So, enter 2025 armed with knowledge and a plan to make sure you can watch everything you want to, without mindlessly sifting through everything you don’t.