We were much more use to undistracted time

Magazines, books, reading the backs of products, and sometimes people would even use a mirror or two to watch TV on the shitter.

Presumably on a toilet.

Books.

Well, before phones made social media conveniently available, people largely had to deposit their shit via telephone, written word, or in person.

We read the backs of shampoo bottles.

We used to have words printed on paper (the pressed corpses of trees) called books, magazines, and newspapers. They'd bring one of those.

Farmers Almanac. Used to come with a pre-drilled hole for hanging on a hook in the outhouse.

Magazine racks. Every home had a small one next to the toilet

Video game instruction manuals

Spanish people stopped learning greek after smartphones where invented.

Magazines and we read the ingredient list of bottles, like bleech.

In our pants. Toilets came out around the same time as smartphones, so it’s been a pretty revolutionary couple of decades around here.

I had to poop really bad the other day. I had to make a run for it and didn't have time to grab my phone first. I was in and out in like 2 minutes!

Pooping shouldn’t be a drawn-out process. You’re better off keeping your toilet time to less than 10 to 15 minutes, says Gregory Thorkelson, M.D., a psychiatrist in the department of gastroenterology, hepatology, and nutrition at the University of Pittsburgh.

In fact, you should only make your way to the bathroom when the urge hits.

If the urge to poop isn’t there, you might be tempted to push or strain to try to get the job done.

And all that straining could lead to the development of hemorrhoids—bulging blood vessels around your anus that can become swollen and painful or even bleed.

https://www.menshealth.com/health/a19521086/time-spent-pooping/

We had a little basket thingy with books and magazines. Stuff like Calvin & Hobbes, I Spy books, Popular Science magazines, etc.

Hopefully through their buttholes, not through their fingers and mouths.

Huh, this vegan dog shampoo has not been tested on animals.

I feel like that's the one product they should test on animals so that my dog doesn't have to be the guinea pig.

I would stare out windows a lot while I was in the bathroom. If you stare at leaves in a tree and let your eyes unfocus you can see patterns and shapes. Sort of like looking for shapes in clouds.

For bathrooms without windows I think I would just use my imagination. I've got a fairly vivid one and just think about random stuff a lot.

It's hard to remember though. I have heard about people reading the ingredients of chemicals while they go, but I've never personally done that.

We read the ingredients on shampoo bottles and we liked it!

We'd look through the bathroom window, there was always something funny going on. Such as packs of velociraptors fighting each other, or a mastodon causing wreck on the neighbour's garden.

Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader!

We fell asleep on the toilet a lot.

Y'all take more than a minute to poop?

Teletype with an acoustic coupler. You place the handset into the rubber cups that block out the sound, so that the modem noises were clear through the phone line.

The perforations in modern toilet paper are an homage to the holes in the punched tape used to feed the teletype pre-recorded instructions.