Day 2 of the No-Internet experiment

The second day of my No-Internet experiment wasn’t the most suitable test subject, since I lost all morning running for errands and taking care of stuff outside of the office. I finally faced my computer about one hour after midday, and when I checked mail (this was the morning check) I was cheering to see that Apple finally approved my company’s enrollment for the iPhone Developer program!

Since I’ve been waiting for Apple to complete the enrollment process for almost 3 months, I decided I could make an exception and stay online for a little while to browse around the iPhone dev portal. This, however, didn’t last long, as I felt an urge to continue my work; the pressure of all those lost hours was intense. This made me realize another important facet of my new working habits:

Time matters. I have to track the time wasted and compensate for it.

Upon getting back to work, I managed to become quite focused, with almost no distractions at all, online or external, for about two and a half hours until my lunch break. Even though the task of styling my client’s CSS menu was becoming quite tedious at times (styling becomes more and more tiring for me as the years are passing by), I didn’t deviate from it, something that wouldn’t have happened last week; I’m sure I would have engaged into some online activity to rest myself a bit.

During work, at one point I was talking with my wife of the phone, and she asked me how it’s going. “Do you still have the Internet off?“, she asked. I was amazed to find out that, I didn’t know whether it was on or off! After checking it out, I discovered that it was on, yet I hadn’t used it for the past couple of hours. So it looks like not using the Internet is becoming a habit to me.

As the days are passing by, I see that this experiment is quite valuable in adjusting my daily habits and schedule while at work. However, the real value of this experiment could be the need to answer the underlying question: “what is information, and how much of it do we really need?“