I took a short sabbatical from twitter and facebook over the last two weeks – no updates and only the occasional message checks.
It was an experiment in focus. What would happen if I put it to one side and focussed those cycles on something else for a while?
When I started out on this experiment I was just going to ignore the updates, but I soon realised that I needed to be a bit more proactive because the lure was too great. This was particularly true when I was sat somewhere and my itchy fingers would get going on the BlackBerry. In the end I deleted all of the clients from all of my devices, this made the break much cleaner – and easier.
While two weeks isn’t long enough to really change habits it did help me to see areas of my life where things needed to get back into focus. One particular area was my abuse of thinking time. I hadn’t realised how much I had filled up all of the pondering time with stuff – checking twitter, reading facebook, etc..
You might have noticed that I’ve written more on this blog in the last two weeks than I have for a good while. It’s not the writing that takes the time when blogging, it’s the pondering. No pondering time meant no writing time. Creating pondering time resulted in a creation of the writing time.
My last two weeks have felt a bit like going on a nice long walk – time to think, and cogitate.
It also felt a bit like going through a form of detox.
I will be back, but I’m not sure in what form, and I may well leave again.
Graham Chastney 