Michele’s Freeminding

For the past few days — from Saturday to today, to be precise — I was away from home and almost 100% disconnected from the Web.
Apart from checking my email from my mobile phone — another good reason to use Gmail — and spending a couple of hours on a dial-up connection to fix a tiny 16bugs bug, those were 5 Internet-free days.

So what’s so special about it that made me want to blog about it?
Well, I’ve found it quite a pleasant situation.

It’s very easy to get into the routine — most of us are deep into it: check email, answer emails, check feedreader, read a couple of interesting articles that popped up in the feedreader and so on.
We’re so addicted to this routine that even though we realize it’s a major cause of procrastination, we don’t do anything to get out of it.

Being away from the Web and being almost unable to check my feedreader — try to scan 200 feeds on a 56k connection…56k? So ‘98 ;) — allowed me to immerse myself in reading, the kind of reading involving a book, and in brainstorming, the paper and pencil one.
Usually, I’d still be reading a book and brainstorming on a piece of paper, but not as much.
And let me tell you the paper-World is much more productive.

Of course, we have outliners, Basecamps, Backpacks and calendars, but are those really enhancing productivity?

What I’ve learnt is when you need to really focus on something and enhance your productivity, it’s enough that you move away from the Web and hold a pencil instead of a mouse.
No GTD or stuff like that: just switch off the router.

That said, I’ve been reading emails and catching up on my feeds for the past couple of hours.
And tomorrow I’ll be inevitably back into the routine again. ;)

This post was written 2 years, 1 month ago on May 17th, 2006 evening time.