Adam Brault quit Twitter for a month and lived to tell about it. Social media has a lot of value, but I think one of the important things Brault observes is that it's even worse than email in terms of exposing yourself to constant interruptions that you derive some enjoyment from, but the fact that there are constant interruptions is a detriment to your mental and emotional well-being in other ways.
Lent is coming up in about a month, so I will be going on my Internet & Social Media fast in a few weeks. Because Neil is traveling, I won't be able to just close Tweetdeck & Google Reader for six weeks. But I'm definitely going to be cutting back on internet content consumption and "compartmentalizing it" until early April.
In a similar vein, if you write for a living, I strongly encourage you to write at least one article per week on pen and paper. Losing access to easy editing forces you to think differently, and, in my untrained experience, produce higher quality writing.
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"In a similar vein, if you write for a living, I strongly encourage you to write at least one article per week on pen and paper. Losing access to easy editing forces you to think differently, and, in my untrained experience, produce higher quality writing."
That may be true for you, but in my personal experience it's quite the opposite. The ability of my fingers to almost keep up with my thoughts enables me to write far better than I could otherwise, and the ability to edit in real time enables me to clarify my original thoughts much more precisely as well.
Back in the pen-and-paper days (which I was in until I was 40), I'd usually just throw in the towel trying to write. My mind would be racing far, far ahead of where my writing was on the page, and I'd quickly lose the thread.
To go back to pen and paper would be like becoming a character in the Vonnegut short story "Harrison Bergeron."
-ltc
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