The creativity destroying distractions of modern life

I made a bet recently with my wife, I bet her that I could go a full week without playing on the internet - that meant no YouTube, no Reddit, no Digg, no Fark, no anything that happens in a web browser.  This might not be a big deal for new junkies who happen to have cable television and have their choice of 80 channels to choose from, but I have given up on cable so we only have 5 channels.  3 of those 5 channels are PBS.  Instead of being horribly bored and cut off from society, I found that I was happier and more productive.

Normally, I might sit down and try to write one or two articles a week when the feeling hits me.  I wrote 6 articles the first day and was able to cover quite a bit of research for a graduate thesis.  The articles may be all crap, but I wrote them and that wouldn’t have happened had I sat down at a computer and had access to all the distractions that the internet can provide me with.  It is so easy to sit down at a computer and fire up the web browser first thing, but if you have work to get done that web browser is like a time wasting trap.

I would typically start out by firing up my word processor and then coming up with a title, once the title was up I would take a quick break to read Reddit or Digg.  That break would go a little further until I made it over to Fark to see what their headlines were.  Find an interesting headline?  Great!  Read the comments to see if other people came up with the catchy quote that you did.  Finished the quotes?  Go back to Reddit to see if anything new happened in the world.  Nothing happened in that 15 minutes?  Head on over to YouTube and watch some videos.  I always browse through my favorite TV shows and watch video clips of Top Gear.  Seen enough of those?  A quick flash game over at ArmorGames won’t hurt anything.  Before you know it, 2 or 3 hours have passed and you have accomplished nothing.

Not only have you completely wasted your time, but now it is likely time for lunch or dinner, which means more time away from what you need to be doing.  If you have cable TV thrown into the mix it is likely that you can spend your entire day being entertained without ever even having to use your brain at all.  What did I discover?  Simply the truth that if you unplug your modem and switch off your TV you can accomplish quite a bit in one day.