disruption.ca

In September I noticed that I was spending an unreasonable amount of time on news and link sites. In addition to a large list of RSS subscriptions that I read daily, I regularly hit Slashdot, Boing Boing, Reddit, Hacker News and Arts and Letters Daily. There is a lot of overlap, but it adds up to a lot of daily reading. Worse than that, after I read everything interesting I encountered, I would repeatedly visit the same sites to see if there was any new content. It was like I was channel surfing when I knew there was nothing to watch on TV. I even caught myself sitting in front of the computer knowing that I should go to bed, but feeling to lazy to close the web browser and get up.

XKCD nicely demonstrates another problem. I constantly interrupted what I was doing to check for new and interesting things online. I was especially bad for doing this to procrastinate. When I encountered something difficult while working on a task I immediately opened a new tab and loaded a news site.

I’m happy that I don’t watch TV. But my web habits were just as bad as a TV addict’s. I find the web is a particularly dangerous time sink. I can find a constant stream of intellectually stimulating content, and I can participate in the conversation. Time on the web can easily feel like getting real work done.

All of my reading introduces me to fascinating ideas. And I’m well informed about trends, particularly in the technical areas I am interested in. But my reading was eating huge amounts of time. When I noticed how bad it was, I gave it up for a month. I decided that for the month of October I wouldn’t read any online news.

I did not intend to fully disconnect from the web. I kept my RSS feeds. If I was looking for something, I googled it. If someone sent me a link, I followed it. But I didn’t visit my standard list of sites for news and entertainment.

I don’t watch TV. I listen to the radio very little. I don’t read newspapers or magazines. And now I was giving up my online news sources. I was concerned about being out of touch with the world. It wasn’t a problem though. If the news was important enough, I heard about it via friends, coworkers or my RSS feeds. I didn’t miss being out of touch. If I had read Boing Boing and Reddit, I would have learnt far more than I needed to about balloon boy. As it is, I’m only vaguely aware of the story.

I kept to my self imposed ban quite successfully. Initially I was shocked at how often I opened a new tab, typed in http://slashdot.org, realized what I was doing, and closed the tab. It wasn’t until almost the end of the month that I broke that habit. I wasn’t completely successful in cutting out my online time wasting though. I started visiting twitter and facebook more than I normally would, checking for updates and information. In retrospect, I should have banned them as well.

The strangest part of the experience is that don’t know what I did with all the time I saved. I didn’t spend a lot of time with family or friends. It doesn’t seem like I accomplished much on my personal projects. My apartment is a mess, and I have a stack of laundry to do. I didn’t spend much time playing video games or reading books. It’s like the time just disappeared. Was I abducted by aliens? A friend suggested that video surveillance footage would show me standing in the doorway of my computer room for hours, frozen with indecision when denied the option of visiting news sites.

I know I wrote a lot of email to a friend in Afghanistan. Now I want gmail to provide analytics for my email account. How many words did I write, and to what email addresses in October? How does this compare to other months? How much time did I spend reading and writing mail? I imagine Google already logs this stuff. I’d love it if I had access to the data. Maybe I should give RescueTime a try, and track what I am doing with my computer. It might show that I am more productive than I give myself credit for.

Now that my month is up I am much less interested in constantly visiting my favorite sites to see what is new online. I seem to have broken the habit, and I’m happy I did.

On the first of November I went to Reddit and loaded the list of the top links from the previous month. The top link, with 4357 points, was titled Well that explains it [pic]. Perhaps I didn’t miss much.