spend less time online

Last night I didn’t bring my computer home from work.
Despite working 2 hours late, I felt like I had so much more free time and enjoyed the evening quite a lot. After working late I came home and spent an hour cleaning up the chaos in the house while listening to a podcast. I didn’t finish (didn’t even touch the bathroom) but an hour is plenty and now most rooms don’t stress me out. Then I made myself a healthy dinner. Then I read until bedtime. I’m currently reading Buddha by Karen Armstrong and it has me wrapped up! I ended up journaling late into the night as I explored how my own philosophy of life, death, religion, evolution and peace. It was quite a lovely evening.

FAIL

“We often think that our affairs, great or small, must be tended continuously and in detail, or our world will disintegrate, and we will lose our places in the universe. That is not true, or if it is true, then our situations were so temporary that they would have collapsed anyway.”

~Maya Angelou

I just installed workrave. I love it! It should help me spend less time online on work days, since I have a 10 hour computer limit and that will include my 8 hour workday. But on the weekends I still need to exercise self control.

I didn’t even touch a computer from Friday afternoon to Monday morning! So nice.

I didn’t touch a computer all weekend. It felt so free.

I found that changing my IM settings so that it doesn’t open automaticaly is a huge help. I only open it when I want to talk to someone specifically and i’m not caught up in so many small talk coversations.

I think I might take a huge leap and unsubscribe from all my 43things subscriptions. I know, it sounds horrible. But I think it is what I need to do to use this site for achieving my goals rather than socializing. I haven’t done it yet. Just thinking about it.

Was pretty much a failure.

Started out innocently enough. There are things that are most efficient online and I convinced myself that I wasn’t doing myself any favors by trying not to use online banking or by trying to figure out how to get flight status without going online….

Eventually that degraded until I found myself online nearly as much as usual. But I was trying not to do anything that could be used as proof that I’d failed. Example. I logged onto 43T at least every other day and skimmed my subscriptions, but I didn’t make any comments, entries or cheers becuase then people would know I was cheating… Completely illogical considering I had every intention of confessing…

I did manage to stay away from myspace, blogs, celeb gossip, magazine-type stuff, shopping and the other big time sucks.

For TV turn off week I’m going to attempt to go internet-free. I don’t watch TV anyway, so this is my way of meaningful participation. Its going to be really difficult over the weekend I think becuase the boyfrined will be out of town so I’ll have very distractions.

I will allow myself to check my email from work once in the morning and once before leaving work. I can’t give up email because its my major communication mode with many friends.

• No more reading blogs besides those of people I already have some kind of rapport with. (Will delete all my bookmarks)

• No celebrity gossip. (Will delete all my bookmarks)

• Limit browsing on Amazon or other shopping sites unless I’m actually looking for something to buy.

• Check bookmooch just once a day.

• Computer off at 10pm.