Disconnecting
by Robert James Reese » April 7th, 2010 » 7 Comments
Helen and I headed up to western Massachusetts this past weekend to spend Easter with her family. We got in a couple tough, long, hilly, and very muddy trail runs while up there, but that's not what I'm going to write about. Instead, I want to mention something we didn't do.
Neither of us brought our computers along for the weekend, Helen forgot her iPhone charger, and my BlackBerry wasn't getting any reception. And so, by accident, we ended up with a whole weekend free of social media. On a train somewhere in Connecticut Sunday evening, we commented on how nice it was to have had our time to ourselves and not to have wasted it checking the updates of hundreds of acquaintances (many of whom we have little, if any, actual interest in). We talked about how checking Facebook or Twitter was almost more of a nervous habit than the result of an actual desire to read the updates.
That conversation transitioned into a plan to start avoiding social media and to recapture the time that it has stolen from our lives. With the week almost halfway over now, I still haven't logged into Twitter and the only time I went to Facebook was to comment on a link someone had posted to my wall (and which I was notified of by email). I deleted the links to the sites from my browser and removed the applications from my phone.
I've been avoiding blog reading too. Today, I opened up Google Reader out of curiosity about how many unread articles there would be (only 36 since I'd already been pruning my subscriptions heavily lately) but didn't click through to any of them. It's not that I'm not interested in what everyone else has to say, it's just that I'm realizing that I only have a finite number of hours in the week and I need to prioritize my activities so that I spend my free time doing the things that I most want to do. Or, to put it in other words, I want to spend more time running and less time reading and writing about running. I'll still write up here whenever I have something interesting to say (or, more accurately, something that I think is interesting) but I'm going to stop looking at keeping up the blog as an obligation.
I really enjoy all the great comments I get up here and hope that they keep coming even if I'm not as consistent about getting around to everyone else's writing and commenting there.
Neither of us brought our computers along for the weekend, Helen forgot her iPhone charger, and my BlackBerry wasn't getting any reception. And so, by accident, we ended up with a whole weekend free of social media. On a train somewhere in Connecticut Sunday evening, we commented on how nice it was to have had our time to ourselves and not to have wasted it checking the updates of hundreds of acquaintances (many of whom we have little, if any, actual interest in). We talked about how checking Facebook or Twitter was almost more of a nervous habit than the result of an actual desire to read the updates.
That conversation transitioned into a plan to start avoiding social media and to recapture the time that it has stolen from our lives. With the week almost halfway over now, I still haven't logged into Twitter and the only time I went to Facebook was to comment on a link someone had posted to my wall (and which I was notified of by email). I deleted the links to the sites from my browser and removed the applications from my phone.
I've been avoiding blog reading too. Today, I opened up Google Reader out of curiosity about how many unread articles there would be (only 36 since I'd already been pruning my subscriptions heavily lately) but didn't click through to any of them. It's not that I'm not interested in what everyone else has to say, it's just that I'm realizing that I only have a finite number of hours in the week and I need to prioritize my activities so that I spend my free time doing the things that I most want to do. Or, to put it in other words, I want to spend more time running and less time reading and writing about running. I'll still write up here whenever I have something interesting to say (or, more accurately, something that I think is interesting) but I'm going to stop looking at keeping up the blog as an obligation.
I really enjoy all the great comments I get up here and hope that they keep coming even if I'm not as consistent about getting around to everyone else's writing and commenting there.
7 Comments
Remember, you have to disconnect to reconnect.
I think there's some good value online content out there that I wouldn't like to miss, including quite a few running blogs. These belong to real people who have a passion for running -- I'm interested in how they run and why. FB I can get by with a once a week check (if I think of it), and Twitter, well, I still don't get it.
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