A mini Digital Detox

Dear All: I’ll be undertaking a “Digital Fast” over the next 3 days.  Although the idea has been on my mind for the last several month, something prompted me to say “enough” yesterday evening. Perhaps it was the urge to check my email one last time before switching my laptop off..or perhaps it was the strain I felt in my eyes after almost 10+ hours of screen time..or the realisation that my “To Read” list of books/articles is continuously increasing.

I am undertaking this “fast” in the hope I’ll be able to strengthen my mental discipline and find time to do some serious, uninterrupted thinking. And I hope to come back renewed and refreshed…

Starting a few hours from now, I will be off facebook, my blog and twitter for the next 3 days. I will unfortunately not be able to completely switch off emails but I am going to diligently keep a record of time I spend online (I’ll share the results/experiences from this 3-day fasting on the  blog & on the fb page).  In the meantime, here is a first-hand account from someone who decided enough was enough and decided to take a “digital detox” (emphasis added):

Setting aside BlackBerry time at evenings and weekends, I was devoting eight hours a day to digital media…After a month, strange things started to happen. I found it difficult to concentrate on any given task for more than a few minutes. My mind felt scattered and my focus wandered from email to web page to tweet to email and back again. Despite working ever more furiously, I would reach the end of a 10-hour day and feel I had achieved almost nothing. What had I learnt? Which of those hundreds of bite-size pieces of information had actually lodged in my brain? What had I created – which is, after all, my primary working function? The answer, frustratingly, was usually very little.

…My constant cyber-hopping meant that I had never really stopped, taken a deep breath and let my poor, overcooked brain rest.

That is what I am planning to do..give my hyper-active, over-fed brain some rest!

In the meantime, please have a walk through the Archives (right hand sidebar just below the subscribe box). You can rely on serendipity to find something interesting…or use the “Search” boxes (at the top and bottom of the page; the two boxes use different search engines) to pick up some of the 1300-odd posts on the blog.  Alternatively, pl have a look at the “Categories” drop down menu (and don’t forget the “Featured Posts” on the top-right hand side of the main page). Or you can follow one of the *live* discussions via the comments sidebar.

During the next few days, please expect some delay in my responses and in moderating comments that may have been held in a queue (the blog is still a one-man effort). Most of you are already familiar with my comments policy but here is a reminder.

P.S. No, I am *not* being a reverse snob. For the more curious amongst you, here is a (somewhat) extreme version of digital detox.