Tag Archives: Internet as time waster

Email in the Afternoon

 

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.

VORTEXMy 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.

 

The Gift of Ignoring

 

Everyday as I boot up my computer, I try to ignore the items that fly at me off the news page. I don’t check my email, either. I look at the weather and ignore the rest. (This is the Pacific Northwest, where weather is as changeable as young love.) I confess to failing occasionally, but I believe the ability to ignore is a gift worth cultivating.

I’m able to write full time, certainly a blessing. However, blessings can be wasted. I must plan my time intentionally, guided by purpose. First I write for several hours. Then I allow myself a brief check of email in case an urgent one requires immediate attention. Otherwise I give only a cursory glance to the digital messages. Then it’s necessary chores: perhaps a marketing task or cooking a casserole or cleaning the house or attending a meeting—whatever obligations I need to meet for that day.

Late in the day, when I’m tired and want to do frivolous stuff for a while, I’ll check email, blogs, maybe some social media sites, eventually the news. I have to work it this way.

The Internet is a bottomless pit that is the best illustration I know of insatiability. You can literally spend all day on it. But if you do, nothing else gets done.

An intentional life requires discipline, including the gift of ignoring even good things until the right time.