March 1, 2011: …enjoys having a mostly unplugged home. At least there the distractions from studying produce tangible results.
Some days I feel like those poor people on the Bing search engine commercials. You know, the ones who are suffering from “search overload”. Their speech reminds me of word salad, nonsense mixed with loosely related terms. Take that, put it in my head, and that’s where I’ve been lately. My main job (outside of wifehood) is to be a student, which necessitates long hours of studying one subject at a time. However, unless the test is within the next two days, I rarely am able to focus for more than half an hour. What makes it worse is when I can think of a hundred and one other things to be doing, most of which involve computer access.
And there is my downfall.
The Internet creates an environment in which I can follow every little rabbit trail back to its hole, fall down the hole, and get lost in a Wonderland of the written word. The cycle goes through Facebook, WordPress’s Freshly Pressed, my friends’ blogs, email, and updating my and Beloved’s budget. Then it begins again. I don’t know what I expect to find new or different in the quarter-hour it takes to complete one round. Maybe I am just avoiding my work.
It doesn’t matter. The bottom line is I spend waste too much time mindlessly consuming empty calories. Yes, I do keep up with friends on Facebook and blogging sites, but it’s more of a voyeuristic relationship than an interactive one (that is to say, my friends are important, and while it is nice to see their public updates, I could find much better ways and times to catch up with them). Yes, e-mail does bring me information about school, but most of the messages I receive are inapplicable to me and promptly deleted. Yes, the budget is important to maintain, but it really doesn’t require much except the monthly bank statement reconciliation.
So, partially for my mental health (and partially to save on our power bill), we unplugged our apartment. Television, gaming system, computer, off. This makes it more inconvenient to waste my time on these things, and also causes me to schedule blocks of “productive technology time”. Tuesday, for example, was a study day. I turned on Pandora Radio on my phone (for background noise and preventing unnecessary use) and accomplished much more than usual: three to four hours of studying, broken up by thirty-minute intervals of housework. It is easier to make good things happen when you remove the possibility of the worst distractions.
That being said, the next area to tackle is my free time at school: how do I use it judiciously? How do I keep from eating up my evenings with things that should have been done during the day?
