For about the past 2 and a half weeks, I’ve hardly touched a computer. No blogs, no reading, hardly any email. It’s been wonderful. But that was vacation, and this is home – so what now?
Now I look for ways to keep going the freedom of thought I felt while away. Here are some things I’m doing:
- Culling blog subscriptions. Today I went through my Bloglines and eliminated about half of the feeds I was following. I know my reading habits, and for many feeds, I was just skimming. At best. I wasn’t enjoying the read, and it was feeling more and more like a chore. Of the 50 that remain, about another half are on probation. By the end of the month, more will most likely go.
- More creative free thought. Throughout my life I’ve had periods of greater and less difficulty with my imagination and putting it to use. There are a lot of things I thought about during my and Jodie’s time away, and there are many ideas that I’m just going to start fiddling around with offline. It’ll be interesting to see where they go.
- Less email and feed checking. I’ve always been a bit of an email and RSS obsessive, but have been working on changing that. Email does not need to be checked more than twice a day, at the most. I’m currently working on making sure that things like Facebook and email don’t get checked or thought about more than twice a day. That will get whittled down further as needed. Same goes for feeds; they can be checked in the afternoon and maybe in the evening, but no longer during the morning. During morning my mind is fresher and needs to do things more creative (as per above).
That’s a partial list. There are other things; from being better about reading time to slotting in more time for things like house projects.
It’s good to have time away, to reflect on what I do and how and why. Now that I’m back, it will be interesting to see what the next few months of conscious change brings.
