Digital sabbath
I spend too much time in front of computers. On the average day, I have seven hours at work, followed by anything from two to five hours at home in the evening. Most of this time is unproductive — it’s oh, so easy, to get sucked into playing around with this or that new application, or following links from Twitter, or, well, just clicking about here and there. The truth is that at the end of any given day I might be hard-pressed to even account for what I’ve done for the twelve online hours that have just passed. Ah, Eliot, ‘tis of I you speak: ‘Distracted from distraction by distraction.’ (‘Burnt Norton’)
I’ve tried a few different ways of tracking my time and my attention. I’ve used online services like Slife, which catalogue the sites you visit and applications you run on your computer, and then present you with summaries and charts so that you can be horrified by how you spend your time. And I’ve used a couple of very good time-tracking programs (I’ve settled on Billings3) to keep track of my freelance work.
I’ve come to think that I actually have a problem, and that I need to go to source if I’m going to work it out. The problem is that my time is ticking away, and I’m not applying myself to the things I truly care about because I’m caught up in mildly interesting, attention-grabbing things. I returned ten days ago from a week up a mountain in rural Wales. I wasn’t entirely disconnected up there — I watched a couple of movies on my iPod, I listened to music and a few podcasts, I even checked my email a few times. I wasn’t about to go completely cold turkey.
But now I have decided that I am. At least for short periods of time. For one day per week I’m going to unplug completely. I’ve borrowed as my name for this new habit Mark Bittman’s phrase, ‘digital sabbath.’ Bittman wrote about his own practice of unplugging in an article in the New York Times — I read that while I was away in Wales, and it made a whole lot of sense to me. I had read about Ariel Meadow Stallings’s ‘52 Nights Unplugged’ at some point last year (of course, I’ve no idea where I came across it, as it was probably in the middle of an evening’s frenzied site-hopping!), and thought it sounded like a good idea. But I didn’t manage to do anything with that good idea.
Now I have. For the past two weeks, I’ve implemented my own ‘digital sabbath’: at bed-time on Saturday, I’ve switched off the computer and the TV and my iPod and my phone, and I’ve kept them off until Monday morning. Well, let’s be honest… The first week I did actually manage to keep to it that strictly, but there’s not much point to me doing it too dogmatically — I know me: I’ll just swing to the opposite extreme if I push it too hard. So, yesterday, I read two articles I’d saved to Instapaper on my iPod — if I’d remembered on Saturday night, I might have printed them, but as it was, I felt fine about reading them as I did (saving a few printed pages along the way). And in the evening, my wife and I watched an episode of ‘Criminal Minds’ with our supper. But after that we turned off the TV, and I returned to reading the book I’d started earlier in the day — I felt little impulse to carry on watching anything else.
And, most importantly, the computer was still switched off. You see, that’s the screen I’m really concerned about, because that’s my greatest attention-suck — it’s where the hours of my day, and my life, can quietly drain away without me noticing.
So what did I do these two Sundays past? On both days I got to spend a few hours with good friends, which was great. And most of the rest of the day I spent reading (this week the wonderful and fascinating Michael Pollan, last week an interesting book on psychotherapy and Buddhism). I’ve been finding it really difficult to settle down with a book for the last long while, so these two days of reading most of a book have been real changes from that pattern, and minor triumphs in their way.
And I noticed this morning that there’s a corollary to all this: when I turned on my laptop, I had 13 email messages, 154 Tweets and Facebook updates, and 145 unread RSS articles. It took me about 10 minutes to zip through all this — of course I saved a few emails to respond to later, sent a couple of articles to Instapaper, and added some others to NetNewsWire’s clippings. But I was done with the top-level processing in 10 minutes. And that shows me that I could very likely spend less time on the computer just by processing things more effectively. For one thing, if I stuck to checking email and RSS only every couple of hours, rather than in the real-time, knee-jerk, ‘Oh my gosh, the dock icon says I have an unread feed in NetNewsWire, better switch over right away…’ kind of distraction-frenzy I usually operate with, I would, overall, waste a whole lot less time staring at this screen.
And now I’m off to read more of Michael Pollan.
