My Experiment

Where to begin.... Let's see. It all begins months and months ago with me spending more and more time on the computer. Sometimes I'm on the internet, sometimes I'm scrapping, sometimes I'm doing both. It seems like lately I'm always on. I'm constantly checking my email, my IMs, my favorite sites. It's to the point that I feel stressed out if I'm away from the computer. I've been slowly realizing that what I've been doing is probably not good for me or for my family. I can't hear that IM pop up without rushing to check it. I check in with certain forums more times a day than I can count. I scrap all the time. I'm losing sleep, I'm low on patience, and I think I'm suffering because of it. Yes, in the back of my mind for a while now, I've known I needed to make a change.

Fast forward to yesterday. Things have been going pretty much normally, although I have been trying to spend a tad less time on the computer. Yesterday, though, I was online, chatting on IM, and just "busy" in general. All of a sudden, all of our internet just died. No wireless on the lappy, no normal internet on the PC. No internet. No IM. No nothing. And we couldn't fix it. It was early in the evening...a long Saturday night stretching in front of us. What would I do with no computer? I was stressed.

That's when it hit me. It is ridiculous for me to feel this way. Yes, the internet is great, Being able to chat with my friends is great. Scrapping is great. But not great enough to make me freak out about not having it for one night. So, I made myself calm down. We had a nice family dinner. The kids went to bed early. Shane and I cozied up on the couch and I started a book I've been meaning to start. I read and Shane watched football for a while. Then we decided to watch a movie. Together. On the couch. No jumping up to check the IM buzz. No checking email "one last time." No "checking in" before bed. No internet seemed to equal the most quiet, peaceful evening we've spent together in quiet a while. Hmmmm....maybe that nagging voice in my head telling me that my computer addiction is out of control has been right this entire time.

So, where does that leave me? What's my point? The internet is back, up and running normally. But I've decided to try a little experiment. I say little because I'm setting the short term timeline as 48 hours. For the next 48 hours, I'm allowing myself only 1 hour of computer time. That's 30 minutes a day. And I'm sticking to it. I can use that 1 hour however I like. I will do a quick blog update each day and I'm sure I'll check into my normal sites. I may break it into 10 minutes at a time or 15...I just don't know yet. I'll have to see how it goes. But I just can't wait to see how I feel at the end of these 2 days.

Do I think this will be hard? YES! Will there be times that I'm dying to check in? YES! Will I totally ignore my IMs? No, of course not. But I will be timing myself, making sure I don't break my goals. Who knows what this will show me...but I sure do hope I learn something about myself. So, until Tuesday....I'll be in and out. Mostly out.