After months of the life of hermitude, I finally have the mighty tubes reconnected to my house. It’s nice to be back, but it is also good to go through a period without Internet access. My life is more balanced now because I see what the Internet  is good for, and where it can be a time-wasting pain in the ass. It has also readjusted my thinking on the importance of computers in my life in general.

It’s really easy for me to sit down in front of the computer and just waste time. That’s OK if that’s what I need to do, but I hate to get up hours later and find that I’ve done nothing. I need a certain amount of productivity balanced with a reasonable amount of leisure time to stay sane. Now I leave the computer off most of the time, and when I sit down to work, I do what I came to do then walk away. I gain lots of time that way.

On some subliminal level the computer symbolizes work so much that when I sit down at my desk at home I have this feeling of anxiety about getting things done. If I plan what I’m going to do when I sit down, do it, then get up it works.

I do a lot of journaling, and I’ve moved that mostly to paper and pen. I miss being able to have backups of everything I’ve written and being able to search my writing based on date or keyword. Other than that, writing on paper really has advantages. It keeps me from bleeding away time with editing stuff I may never read again, it gives me more of a 2D approach to layout, and I can carry a journal and write anywhere.

So it’s nice to be forced to re-establish my priorities a bit. Sometimes it takes an unavoidable external influence to get me there.