My Day Off Of The Internet

On Father’s Day of this year, I decided to take a day off from the internet. I got the idea from Phil Cooke’s Reconnect to Disconnect campaign**.** Since this was my first father’s day, I figure it was a great time to experiment with a day off (and my wife insists I’m addicted).

The Rules:

• From 10p on Saturday night to 10p on Sunday night, no internet.
• No computer use at all, no “smartphone” use, no tablets for reading.
• I can use the phone part of my smartphone.
• I can respond to text messages (I really don’t text that much anyway)

How I Did It:

• Turned off my computer (it could use a break)
• On my Android phone, disabled real-time syncing. No e-mails would be retrieved and no applications that automatically pull data would sync.

How It Worked:

Remarkably easy. My only issue was the habit I have of wanting to check my e-mail/social networks. With everything turned off, my phone never beeped and even when I pulled it out to look at it, nothing was there to tempt me. The fact that it was an action packed Father’s Day made it that much easier. I never sat on the couch bored with a need for an information fix.

I was interested to see what my inbox would look like 24 hours later. In a matter of 15 minutes, I had parsed through all of my e-mails, updated myself on the world around me, and it turns out I missed nothing. The world continued without me.

I’m excited to try it again.

As originally posted at jayschulman.com on June 24, 2011.