Off the grid

I’m bad at multi-tasking. Unless I’ve had an overdose of coffee I would be much better off doing one thing at a time. And that’s only because if I have had an overdose of coffee there’s nothing you can do to constrain me to one activity short of putting me in a straitjacket. I’m bad at multi-tasking, and this is a difficult thing to say with surety because we seem to be a generation of people who think they were built to multitask. We’re surrounded by televisions and laptops and tablets and smartphones that scream out for our attention all the time.

I’m immersed in the internet. Trying to keep the internet out of my thought-space on a normal working day is almost as hard as trying to hold breath in my lungs. The last time I did something uninterrupted for more than an hour was probably years ago. I’m so deeply addicted to multi-tasking that I don’t even want to tell you how I plan to make it better right now. I only plan to conduct an experiment, to see how much of a difference not being distracted all the time can make. I plan to spend 2 hours off the grid everyday. Fine, we all know that’s over ambitious. I plan to spend 90 minutes 3 times a week, not counting Sunday, off the grid.

This can be anytime after 10pm, so I have to make sure that I finish work by 10pm on these days. And if I want more, then I can easily spend 4 to 6 hours off the grid on Sundays. This will be 90 minutes where I turn off the internet and my phone. No TV either, but I can use a computer if I want to, as long as it’s offline. I know I should ideally turn the computer off too, but computers have music and audio recording software and lessons on music theory, or whatever the latest thing I want to learn is.

I worry that I know almost for sure that I’m a less interesting person than I was three years ago. I’ll let you know how this goes.

2 thoughts on “Off the grid

  1. Sounds like a good plan. On a related note, I read this book by A.J. Jacobs called My life as an experiment. It got a bit boring by the end, but one of the experiments he wrote about was his life with absolutely no multitasking. It was SO awesome. Read it if you ever get a chance.

    1. I will. Unfortunately, I already have two half read books that I haven’t touched for a month and two more books in my reading queue. At my current pace, that should take me the rest of the year to finish.

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