I am going on a digital diet
The monotony and solitude of a quiet life stimulates the creative mind. -Albert Einstein
This blog post is inspired by two great articles: a blog post by Matt Henderson (@mhenders) titled My New Social Media Diet and an article by Scott Belsky related to downtime (@scottbelsky).
I decided to go on a digital diet. I will limit my time spent answering emails, reading RSS feeds, reading articles, tweeting, posting status updates on Facebook and watching YouTube videos. I want to limit the amount of time I spend in front of a screen - be it a desktop computer’s, an iPad’s or an iPhone’s screen. I want to break the habit of feeling the urgency to stay always on, to stay connected.
There is a point when being online all the time starts to get counter productive. I don’t believe I have reached that point yet, but I’d rather do something about it now than when it gets worse. There are many things that I want to do and there is only so much time to do those things. I don’t want to stop using all the great tools and networks that I benefit from every day - I just want to rethink how and why I use them. I would like to use them in a meaningful way.
There really isn’t much for me to say here, as others have explained the importance of taking breaks much better than me. In order to stay productive, we need to get unproductive. It sounds very Zen-like, but I know it’s true.
