spend less time on the internet

The last three days I haven’t turned on my computer after work. I’ve come home, showered, read a book, and gone to bed (I work in the evening). It’s working pretty well, and I’ve actually found myself waking up an hour before my alarm, just in time to go watch the sunrise. I think that’s because I fall asleep more easily when I haven’t been on the computer; reading a book is more relaxing. I went for a bike ride around the lake yesterday morning.

I read on a blog somewhere the idea to use only battery power on the weekends; when the battery is finished, no more using the computer until Monday. I thought it sounded like a good idea. I could take my charger to work on Thursday and leave it there until Monday. The problem is my weekends are pretty long. 9pm Thursday to 7pm Monday. During the week I’m pretty busy, so I think it’s a little extreme, and wouldn’t leave me with enough time to get done the things that I really do want to do online.

I tried only getting online after work, and it went okay for about a week, but it didn’t last.

My new strategy is to set up my router to block all http traffic for all but two days a week. Then I can still use my computer for other things, but with less temptation to go to the web, as I would have to unblock it first.

I also read an article about quitting smoking recently and I’m trying to apply some of its strategies to my problem:
http://www.cnn.com/2007/HEALTH/08/31/healthmag.smoking/index.html

I’m trying to only turn on my computer after work (I work in the evening). I bought a white board today to keep my to-do list on so that I won’t have to turn on my computer to access it. If I only use my computer at night, that limits me to only a couple hours per day at most (at least, once I start going to bed at 1:00). That should free up my daytime hours to do better things than waste time on the Internet.

I also replaced slashdot in the RSS feeds I read with the RSS feeds for my two favorite categories from slashdot. That should make it much easier to catch up on RSS feeds every night.

I seem to be spending a bit more time on the Internet lately, and I have more important things that I really need to take care of that aren’t getting done. So, I’m re-opening this goal.

I’m thinking about buying a timer that I can start and stop and start again, then decide on an amount of time to limit myself to each day (I’m thinking two hours), setting the timer, and starting it everytime I get online. Or maybe I could set it for short periods (say a half hour) and require myself to do something else for a certain amount of time before I can get back online for another short period. I think this approach would keep me from getting wrapped up in browsing one site and blowing all my time in one place.

Trying to do this gets me nothing but stress. The only reason for me to do this is to give me more time for other things, but I don’t really feel like I’m lacking time to do other things. Spending time on the Internet is simply what I like to do in my spare time. If there’s something else I want to do, I’ll do it (or at least, something other than the Internet, e.g. money, will be the limiting factor). If I just accept this, then I don’t have to feel stressed about trying to spend less time at the computer.

This one isn’t going very well. I’d kind of forgotten I even had this goal.