Unplugged and my lessons learned

I wanted to do a follow up post of my experience from unplugging from the internet. While I decided to take a day vs a longer period of time I felt as though my mini experiment was a success, but I’m far from finished. Last Saturday, I completely unplugged from the internet. When I embarked on this experiment my goal was to see if my unhealthily consumption of information via the internet was impairing my ability to focus. I first got wind of this possibility from reading about Paul Miller from the Verge’s experiment where he completely unplugged from the internet for a year.  While my reasons were simpler than Paul’s I came across another article (that I don’t agree with 100%) that gave me further insight into my problems and a few things that I can do to further gain razor like focus.

Last Saturday I turned off my cellphones, unplugged my Apple TV and made sure that I had created a vacation reply to let people know that I’m taking an internet day off. From there my Saturday was pretty normal. I began by going to my boys soccer games then I did a few things around the house to keep myself busy. I didn’t feel any withdrawals or even the urge to go online. I simply didn’t. I didn’t feel any type of revelation or haha moment. I simply realized that I didn’t need to be on the internet.

My next phase is going to be unplugging daily. From 9 – 10 p.m I plan on completely unplugging from the internet to read a book. I have a large stack of paper back books about code that I’ve neglected. I plan on reading them before I go to bed to see if this will effect my focus.

While this post didn’t provide anything enlightening or revolutionary I feel as though it’s my first step into having a healthy balance of online offline life.

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