Pull the plug, lady!
I’m sure you’re all waiting with bated breath to hear the results of the internet diet & my thoughts on it after finishing! I ended up just doing one hour a day; thirty minutes in the morning and thirty minutes at night. I was originally going to do two hours a day, but figured I might as well do as little as possible. Without further ado…
The good:
- Once I had a time limit established, it was really, really easy to stay under that time and still get done everything I needed done. A large part of this might be due to my personal situation (I know a lot of other people get more email/comments and are subscribed to more blogs than I am), but with 30 minutes I managed to check my email, check job listings, read comments/delete spam, read a blog entry or three, and even tweet a couple of times.
- I found it a lot easier to stick to my morning routine of doing yoga before anything else. I’m not sure why, maybe because I knew I’d be closing the laptop after 30 minutes, and then I’d end up doing the yoga anyways.
- I generally found myself less stressed out throughout the week.
- Lots more time for reading.
- And for some reason, I slept much better than usual!
The bad:
There wasn’t any bad, actually! Except coming back to a large backlog of blog posts in my Google Reader. And missing my Twitter buddies.
Thoughts & reactions:
I think the weirdest thing for me was realizing how not-bad it is to only check email twice a day. I had this vision of my email inbox overflowing, with me frantically trying to keep up, and in reality? Not so much. I don’t know if it’s because checking your email every ten minutes gives the illusion of receiving many more messages than there actually are, or what, but there you have it.
The main thing I decided is that I need to cut down my intake of internet-based media, pure and simple. I’ve already cleaned up my reader by some 30%, and I’m unsubscribing from email lists left and right. I think a large part of the reason I’ve been feeling very stale and in somewhat of a rut lately is that most of the things I read or look at are internet based – this isn’t bad in and of itself, but for my brain to have a large reservoir of inspiration to draw from, more variety is needed.
The problem is, as I noted last time, the totally frickin’ addictive nature of the internet. My eventual goal is to try and get everything internet related that needs done in two or three days a week. All the internet-based writing, blog maintenance, email reading/replying, that good stuff. The rest of the time, I’ll be keeping it down to two hours a day. And I’m going to keep only checking my email 2-3 times a day, as well as stay off the computer for an hour or two before bed since it seems to have made me sleep so much better.
Oh, and as far as the direction of the site? I decided I’d just write what I wanted to, and make up new categories all willy-nilly as needed. Which means there is a strong possibility of non-fashion/style related posts in the future, just a heads up!
