Which activities make you lose track of time?

I like to think that there are two categories of activities for this prompt: where time is completely ignored, or where I’m subconsciously aware but not actually paying enough attention to care.

The former category is easy enough. Video games, reading, and painting miniatures. I can really lose myself in those activities. There’s always a “just one more thing” or “after this I’ll check the clock” but I inevitably fail at least once to follow through. Next thing I know it’s 2:00AM on Wednesday and I have to be at work in six hours.

The latter category above will take just a tad of explanation to understand. If I happen to be listening to music while I’m painting miniatures I will sometimes become conscious of the fact that I’ve listened to a handful of songs and feel the need to check the time. Songs aren’t all the same length, but they do have durations. I’m not sure how accurate this is, but I loosely associate one song to being three minutes long (as an average across all music, and not necessarily an average of all songs on the current playlist.) So when I realize a handful of songs have gone by, I assume it’s probably been about 15 minutes. Similarly, when I’m binge watching something, I have a rough estimate of how long each episode is after cutting out intro/outro time, so when I realize I’ve just watched three episodes in a row, it’s probably been an hour.

On rare occasions, when I’m at work, I can run into a weird blend between the two categories. I have caught myself getting so engrossed in whatever I was doing that I miss a meeting by a few minutes (Outlook reminders sometimes pop in the background for some reason and on Windows 11 the flash on the taskbar is kind of subtle) or the next time I look at the clock it’s after quitting time. Listening to music doesn’t always help, either, because I usually use it to block out the noise from all the other people working around me.

I’ve got a lot of minis to paint, so maybe I’ll spend time getting lost in that activity soon.