Tesh was telling me that he had been thinking about trying to go offline, cold turkey, for a week. See what would happen, see if he could do it. I told him I’d done this a couple of times, coinciding with trips explicitly intended to be offline. The first time, I didn’t take any uplink terminals of any kind. Took an iPad with me the latter time, but for the books on it. Kept it in Airplane Mode for 99% of the trip.
(Full disclosure: I cheated the second trip, for one day — just to send an email to L to see if she could please select seats for me on international flights. But no other reading / writing online of any kind.)
I told him that upon returning, I was able to continue with that flow, for the most part.
We should clarify, that by offline we really mean minimal surfing. Not cutting out email, meaningful IM conversations, staying in touch with people, but more the extraneous barrage of content available to an idle mind.
So I thought I would try to write up what I noticed, and the aftermath of this for me. Your own applicability may vary.
For me, anytime I want to take a break, or I find myself with no immediate action to take, I load up Google Reader. I rarely “surf” anymore, and much of my inbound content comes that way. It’s easier to break open greader for a short stint, because you can cut it off at a 5-minute or 10-minute mark abruptly without feeling rude.
The task in the Idle state is perhaps the go-to for me that leads to extraneous information. The first thing when going offline is to reprogram that state. Email is a natural one to shift to, since we find ourselves with an incessant need to check. Few, if any of us, receive emails that are ultra urgent. And I mean even work emails. It’s taken me a long time to realize that (thank you, Big Company), but finally I know that few emails I get are truly both urgent and important. That’s different from the backlog of emails I need to reply to, which is great. But it’s easy to get lost in ambiguous direction.
So then what?
I come back to the idea of The List. Either you have a list of things that you need to do, and you can start taking tasks off the top. Or you go to the list, and add to it, reorganize it, categorize, whatever. Detailing and maintaining this list will help you start reducing your Idle cycles, and getting more stuff done. For me, this might be anything from moving PDFs of papers I want to read into Dropbox, searching for information about topics I want to learn about and then Instapapering them for later, or even just loading up Instapaper and working through some of the backlog. In some sense, it’s still extraneous information, but for myself I’ve found myself curating Google Reader into Instapaper, and then never actually finding time to follow up. Now I have that time.
The biggest difference in doing this is realizing how much information day-to-day can be completely eschewed. I marked 1000+ Techcrunch articles as read in one fell swoop, and it’s unclear to me if I’ll miss any of them. The part of my brain that whispers that I ought to know everything about everything is hushed into calmness.
There’s probably more, but that’s it for now.
The new iteration of OSX has iOS autocorrect batteries included. Disabled from the get-go, but thought I’d turn it on just for my IM client. Result?
1. Realizing that I use a lot of non-english-dictionary words in the course of general conversation, whether imported or derived from other languages or through liberal expression of poetic license.
2. More frustration than benefit, opposed to on iOS where usually the corrections are welcome.
L
yo yo yo
hello?
are we liveRyan
yeahL
hello
hello
can you hear meRyan
yup
can you hear meL
yay
– snippet of an IM transcript.
“In my own life, I find that when people disagree with my opinions, they are more often than not disagreeing with a misinterpretation of my opinion, not my actual opinion.”
“You would expect artists and content owners to support SOPA, and you would expect the people who would be caught in legal dragnets to oppose it. The interesting people are the crossovers: The parties who take the “wrong” side of the issue. And indeed, many creators do just that, publicly arguing against SOPA even though it is specifically aimed at protecting their financial interests. But at the risk of being unkind, a lot of people become artists because they aren’t good at things like math and legal analysis. When I want an opinion on the Constitution, or economics, I rarely consult an artist.
Bottom line: The crossovers aren’t persuasive.”