It has been been five days since I started my internet diet experiment. If you haven’t read my previous post, this experiment consists of not accessing the internet before 9am and after 8pm.

It’s not hard to stick to a schedule like this, you just unplug your internet connection and you’re ready to go. I planned to use software to automatically disconnect from the internet, but for now I’m doing fine without. Turns out that self will is more than enough.

What’s interesting tough, is what happens when you don’t have an internet connection available. If you are like me, you always have something to check online. Doesn’t matter if it’s email, news or forums, it’s easy to spend hours just because you don’t know what to do, and after a while it becomes an addiction. But when you can’t be online, it’s hard to procrastinate, and you’ll either get stuff done or you’ll go out with your friends/spouse. In my opinion, is better to go out for a walk instead of sitting in front of a computer just to spend some time.

Another interesting thing that I’m noticing is that by limiting the time that I’m spending online, I make better use of it. It’s easy to postpone something if you have lot of time available, but when you know that you must unplug your internet connection in the next 30 minutes, you know that you have to rush.

Internet Diet extension

Since I was previously spending between 11 and 16 hours online per day, what I’m doing is already an improvement, but I’d like to do more. It would be nice to limit internet connectivity to only a few hours per day and see what happens. The only problem is that I need an internet connection for working, but that’s not enough to prevent me from trying it.

I am going to extend the 30 days internet experiment as follow: no internet browsing at all during the day, except if indispensable. One session of 30 minutes in the morning for common tasks like checking emails and news, and another one in the afternoon. These sessions must be after 9 am and before 8pm.

What’s indispensable? In my case indispensable is something that prevents me from completing my work. For example, since I work remotely it’s indispensable for me to keep a chat open with my colleagues during working hours. I also need to check documentation online pretty often and schedule articles for my blogs. I am of course free to do these activities.

On the other hand, checking email, news or youtube channels is not indispensable, so it’s forbidden.

Will one hour be enough for this? I don’t know yet, but I will at the end of these 30 days.