Fortunately February is a short month, but it was more because of delightful coincidence than clever planning that I chose this for my no internet month.

I had expected this challenge to lead to all manner of fabulous, creative and productive things magically happening in the evenings – and that I wouldn’t lose great chunks of time to who-knows-where.

Naturally it didn’t quite pan out how I expected.

At first I was getting in the occasional after work run, a bunch of knitting (so much that I finished the scarf**), occasional reading and a whole lot of television watching. After I completed the scarf, mostly it was just sitting around mentally exhausted in front of the television in the evenings. If I’d been decisive enough to settle on another knitting project I would have done more sitting around mentally exhausted in front of the television while knitting.

After standing outside on the footpath after work trying to wrap up a blog entry, I had to make an exception to the ban for a daily blog and instagram post pretty early on. I really couldn’t fit everything into the morning, and I was okay with that. It was relatively easy to maintain discipline around you can do only these two things in the evening. I didn’t feel deprived because I could catch up in the morning – this probably led to me reading less because by then I’d forget what I wanted to look at.

I hadn’t realised how much time I spend reading blogs until I saw the numbers of unread posts stacking up. I did unsubscribe from a couple that weren’t really doing much for me [verging into hate read territory]; from a couple of design blogs that post about 20 updates per day; and from pop sugar health and fitness – too diety, too instagram fitspo, too many conflicting messages [own and embrace your cellulite, 5 easy steps to get rid of your cellulite], too pervy on dudes [icky and hypocritical].  No huge loss on any of those.

I’m not about All Value Add All The Time – but wow, I just waste a whole lot of my time on non-value-add activities – that aren’t productive, that don’t make me happy, that are simply the result of habit.

What next? I’m going to attempt to be more discerning about what I consume, I’m going to plan some no-pressure activities for after work (they’re not just going to appear if there is a void) and I may try for two non-internet nights a week.

xxx
** waiting on blocking wires to finish it up (hurrah!)