The No-Internet Experiment: A week without connectivity

Part of my resolution for the new year was to get things done, stop wasting time and make my plans come true. But after the first working week of 2009, I see that there are still old habits that are plaguing my productivity, as I found myself pondering at the end of the day, why my work didn’t advance as much as I’d want it to.

I came to the conclusion that the main reason that’s hindering my productivity is getting distracted, not away from my computer but inside it! I do spend most of my day (while working) in front of my iMac, sitting in my office, but am I doing what I am supposed to be doing, or am I constantly wasting my time in a never-ending cycle of tedious distractions?

Reading the news, connecting via Twitter, checking on Facebook, reading (and replying to) e-mail the moment it arrives, engaging into some chatting on MSN or googling that thing that occured to me during the previous night while I was trying to sleep is a huge time-waster. All of these tasks seem quite innocent and may require no more than a couple of minutes to perform, yet there’s an urge to do them again and again during the day, which results in a big waste of precious time without realizing it. I guess this applies to many people who work online.

For example, here’s a quick list of thoughts that trigger such actions:

• “Hm, what’s going on in Twitterland right now? I’ll only take a quick look.“
• “Let’s check my friends’ status on Facebook for a minute.“
• “Gotta check the news, maybe there’s something big happening right now, I’ll just scan the headlines.“
• “Hm, new mail, gotta check it out, I want my inbox to be empty at all times“
• “It’s been some time since I last checked Google analytics, how’s my blog doing lately?“
• “Is a replacement for the Epson R2400 out already? Maybe it’s time to get myself a good color printer“

and the list goes on an on and on…

Not only do these things feast on my time, but more importantly even if they’re only distracting me from work for a couple of minutes, I still have to set my mind again into working on the problem that got interrupted, which can cause mental fatigue if it happens too often. So here I am in 2009, postponing all of my great plans until I’m done with some client work that has been already delayed a lot.

I realized that finishing this work for my clients is a big barrier for me, since I can’t dive into anything big (i.e. start developing an iPhone app) until I’m done with it. If I ever want to begin doing all those things that I long to, I have to get over this barrier, get all those distractions out of the way and boost my productivity.

Shutting down the Internet

In order to do this, I have decided to shut down my office Internet router for the week to come, and see how much more (or less!) productive I’ll be by Friday evening. Not being connected to the Internet means that I won’t be able to do any of the aforementioned actions, therefore I’ll be able to focus on my work and, hopefully, get it done after a week’s hard work (it’s a project stuck in 90% for quite some time).

But why go to such extremes? There are other successful ways of getting things done, i.e. batching your actions, time-scheduling etc. True, these methods are quite effective when it comes to minimizing distractions and focusing on work, yet I think that shutting down the Internet for a (working) week will have a much more powerful effect. It’ll be a standard, to which I’ll be able to compare the amount of online time-wasting I’ll be doing when I turn the router back on next week.

So, starting on Monday morning, I’m shutting down my office Internet router and start working in an environment without connectivity. That means that I’ll also have to turn off e-mail auto-fetch in the iPhone and not allow myself to peek into the Internet over 3G! I’ll still check mail once or twice during the day, only to see if there’s something urgent that I need to act on, and I’ll blog about the process daily when I get back home in the evening, but that will be all.

I think it’ll be an interesting experiment!