Internet Black Out
I love to day dream about what my life would be like if I could write full time. I have enough of a Type-A personality that I like to think about how I would structure my day – still waking up early (as I am a morning person) answering email and tweets over breakfast and once beasts are settled and menfolk dispatched into the “real world” to slay dragons and whatnot I would settle down with my stories and write. However, even in my Type-A daydream, I always wonder and worry about the Internet.
Don’t get me wrong, I know the Internet is a valuable tool for many reasons, but it’s also a horrible time suck. It usually starts out very innocently, I will Google a question I want to have an answer to – earlier this week I Googled a particular type of tattoo a character has because I wanted to make sure that it didn’t have any significance that I was unaware of and half an hour later I’m reading about the new Game of Thrones RPG. Honestly, it always seems to happen that way. The Internet has gotten so good at serving up ads and links I’m interested I feel like I’m jumping down the rabbit hole every time I open a web browser.All of this contemplating lead me to an experiment this week – I went on an Internet Blackout. I don’t write full time for a living so time to write is something I struggle to find in between making a living, taking care of friends and family, yard work, and honestly finding some down time so this week at work instead of going on line in my free time during the day, I worked on my writing. What I do for a living is very busy periods with pauses in between - I write code for a report, I set it to run and then I wait to see what kind of data I’m going to get. Normally while a report runs I hit the Internet, I answer emails, I tweet, I Facebook, whatever. This week I opened a draft and whenever I had a minute or five, I worked on my draft.
The good news is that I feel like I made some progress and frankly as far as work is concerned they probably prefer me not be on the Internet. The bad news is that I feel a little disconnected, every time I log on to Twitter I feel like I’ve missed too many to catch up on and in reducing checking email to a few times a day I feel like I’m missing my friends. I’m still counting the experience a success but I may have to fine tune it a little bit, I’m also going to have to fine tune my home Internet habits. It seems hard to find a way to be connected but not plugged in, but there has to be a balance.
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