Breaking my Internet Addiction

I just returned from a week of downtime in Puerto Rico where I had planned to go totally disconnected — no email, no internet, nothing. My iPhone came along and I vowed to leave it mostly off (I even forgot my charger, woo!).

Disconnecting from my modern internet distractions excited me. It also made me a little nervous.

I ended up still using technology, but all of it was pertinent to traveling and to relaxing. I forgot about everything else. I ended up using the right technology for the situation. Here’s the breakdown:

I did not: use tumblr, twitter, facebook, google reader, or any other hyper dynamic sites.

I did: use the iPhone for maps/directions, weather, its camera, and the yelp app. I used mobile safari to google things I was curious to learn about (what’s up with eating conch?!), wikipedia, and to check out rental cars. I also checked email about once per day and deleted things that didn’t require a response (leaving the rest for when I returned).

I didn’t miss all the sites I normally check. I’ve caught up on email, skimmed my tumblr dashboard, skimmed google reader, and impressed myself that I caught-up on a week of inactivity over the course of a few hours. I broke my addiction to information recency.

Given that I spent a week away from the internet and feel like I didn’t miss anything leads me to believe I should spend more time away from internet distractions. It’s about using the right technology for what I’m doing, and not visiting a site because it’s a quick and more exciting alternative to something else. My typical go to behavior when I become bored or frustrated with something is to check tumblr, twitter, facebook or google reader. I think a better behavior would be to check those sites a few times per day at most.

My hope is that a reduced obsession with information recency will improve clarity of thought, ideas, and generally make life better. Let’s see what happens.