Something is wrong with me.
I can’t get anything done these days (and by days I mean months). It’s really bothering me. I feel like I’m wasting my life and, as I bet you can imagine, that’s not a good feeling.
I don’t want to go into a long self-pitying ramble, or play the self-diagnosis/analysis thing here. Those things won’t help me and will only bore you. There is a strong possibility there are a few labels we could plop onto me if I were to talk with a psychologist and I bet they would even be treatable, but there’s another strong possibility. I think the internet is bad for me.
I realise how ridiculous that sounds coming from someone who runs an e-zine, but it’s true.
When I am unplugged I feel focused, centered, relaxed and I get things done.
My samples are somewhat biased by the fact I’m normally only unplugged when I’m on vacation, so I’m going to (unscientifically) test my new ‘The internet is bad for me’ hypothesis over the next few months. I can’t unplug completely (work and wow make sure of that) but I am going to dramaticaly limit my internet access. Seriously.
The network is going to be configured to be down all day but for an hour (except on my raid day). One hour a day of being online*. One hour. Saying it I feel a mixture of dread and excitement.
I’m going to have one hour to check social networking websites, research, look up markets, surf, Flickr, read Niteblade submissions, you name it. Email is something I’ll be able to download and read offline, and compose replies to send when I go online, so that shouldn’t be a problem. However, only having an hour of browser time is going to require a lot of prioritizing on my part. It’s going to be challenging but I think it will largely sort itself out without too much concious thought from me.
Best of all, maybe I’ll be able to focus and actually get stuff written, revised, done. Focus is good — keep your fingers crossed this will help give it back to me.
I’ll let you know how this goes.
As a reward for reading this far, here are some pictures I took yesterday when I went to the U of A campus on a photo safari:
