The Internet entices like a box of delicate chocolates. Once you start, you don’t want to stop.

Our ancestors managed without checking the next six hours of weather every three hours, or following Britney Spears or Lady Gaga’s latest doings, or watching cute videos on YouTube. Do I even need to journey several hours through more serious stuff: the current Washington debacle, the latest on North Korea, or the most recent crisis in the Middle East? The Internet has a tendency to suck you in forever because it is limitless. If not managed, it leaves no time for real life.

A while back, I noticed the time I spent checking email, Twitter, Facebook, and the news. I decided to wait until afternoon and limit myself to less than an hour. In the evening, when I’m less productive, I allow myself to explore, for an hour or so, the unlimited links of the Internet world. Even so, I must guard against the monster gobbling up my reading time.

My life is more productive and more fulfilled after I snatched it back from the vortex. It’s my life. It doesn’t belong to unfettered digital wanderings any more than it belongs to drugs or other addictions.

I can exercise on my stationary bike and read my print newspaper and actually finish it. It doesn’t have a hundred links that tempt me to wander forever down the halls of the Internet.

Like other virtues with a potential to morph into vices, the Internet is a wonderful servant and a terrible master.