``It will change your life,'' a TiVo devotee told me.

So if you're sitting there reading this column, thinking ``I've got to get my hands on some of that TiVo,'' I have one little word of advice for you: DON'T!

I say this as someone who, right now, should not be at work, earning a living, stretching herself intellectually, engaging in the world, but who should be at home, sitting on the couch, watching all the shows she has recorded so easily the last few months, but not, sadly, had time to watch (even fast-forwarding through the commercials).

So what's so bad about having a bunch of hand-picked shows waiting to be enjoyed?

Oh, nothing, other than the unwatched shows and movies have gained a moral weight of their own, and have joined with the pile of unread magazines and newspapers to silently nag me day and night.

The season opener of ``Friends.'' The two-hour premiere of ``West Wing.'' Reruns of the ``Larry Sanders Show.'' I hear their theme songs in my sleep.

``I can't take the pressure,'' I yelled to no one in particular the other day, as I turned on the television, and in an act of defiance, pushed the ``live TV'' button.

I say ``act of defiance,'' because if I was going to be watching TV at all, I should have been watching one of the programs on the disc. (With two young children, a job, the new hour-a-day fitness requirements and my gossiping needs, I don't have much free time.)

Why should I have been watching one of my recorded shows instead of something current? Because as magical as TiVo is, it has its limits: Sixty hours of recording time, and that's at the lowest quality level. If you want to record at top quality, you've got only 20 hours.

That sounds like a lot of time, but it's like the dentist appointment scheduled six months in advance. When you're leaving the current appointment, relieved you only lost a pint of blood during the cleaning, and psyched about your free toothbrush, six months seems so far in the future that you don't even have to worry about it. And yet, the next thing you know, you're back in the chair, lying about flossing.

So 20 hours seemed like an eternity to me, until the other day, that is, when I nicely asked TiVo to record ``Moulin Rouge'' and it said, essentially, ``OK, I will, but I'm going to have to delete something on the disc to make room for it.''

In other words, I'm facing a future in which I can't record any new shows (to not watch) unless I move some of my old inventory off the floor.

And people thought Solomon was under a lot of pressure!