Feel Good Online? Feel Great Offline!

This guest post is by Jane Sheeba of Find All Answers.

I had to go offline for a week. I packed up my stuff. I scheduled blog posts for those days I’d be away. I packed a couple of books I’d purchased, knowing that it would be really hard for me to stay offline. I couldn’t check mails, there’d be no tweets or buzzing… Life is tough that way, I thought.

When I came back, I realized a great difference in myself: I felt a lot better and recharged. I’m not claiming that being offline is the ideal state for well being. But I certainly recommend offline periods for everyone at some frequency. Let me tell you the goodness I experienced.

My eyes

My eyes thanked me for the break. My everyday routine includes a lot of sitting in front of the laptop. I sit in front of a Linux computer at work (I work full time as a Research Scientist in the field of Medical Physics), and at home is my Windows 7 laptop. I almost always look into a computer monitor, since I work on my blog at home.

When I was offline I no longer had eye balls that hurt. I went to bed before my vision got blurry. My eyes did not scream out to me, asking me to blink. I felt that I have done good justice to my eyes, and I could do more in less time in front of the computer when I was offline, since I had a better vision.

The time I spent with my family and people

Being offline was like being without any perturbations from outside. While at home, I have all email notifiers turned on. I’ll be away from my laptop to clean my house or to put clothes in the washer, when I hear a ‘bing’ (the alert sound when a chat message or a email comes in). I briefly come to the laptop to see if it’s something important. I have wireless enabled and my android phone is on the Web. Even if I go to bedroom, I can’t avoid the ‘bing’. Or I go to the kitchen and boom—an idea pops into my head. I either rush to my laptop or pick up my phone to type it out online (I want my drafts to be in sync wherever I go).

I spend about 15% of my time with my family when I have Internet access at home. But when I was away I spent about 80% of my time with my family, relatives, and friends. I spent a lot of that talking to people face to face and I felt it a lot more realistic and refreshing compared to online socializing.

My back

Sitting in front of a computer for hours at a time is a curse. It takes a lot of practice to learn and implement the correct ergonomic postures. Even if most of us know the correct postures, we don’t take care to stick to them after some time, once we are working with full concentration. We cannot stop our body from changing postures. As we become more and more involved in our work, we take rather bad postures, doing harm to our back and neck.

Well, I am all saying ‘we’; even though I don’t know about all of you, I know this happens with most people.

I felt a lot firm and straight during the week when I was offline. I did not sit in my chair and lean forward. Actually I did not sit in a chair for the most part. I did a lot of walking and moving around, and my back felt so fresh. I never felt the ache that usually occurs at about bed time.

My productivity

I actually thought that since I was going offline I would kill a lot of my productive time. I worried if I could ever catch up at all with all the pending work that would have piled up on my return. To my surprise, the offline time was actually a productive break. I got super-productive and wrote an ebook in 4 days.

Surprisingly, I wrote this ebook in less than 20% of the time (I spent about 80% of the time on socializing, as I said earlier!). 20% of the time is far very little compared to the time I’d usually take, while online, to get this work done. I achieved something that would take about 15 to 20 days if I chose to do it on those days when I’m always online. The problem is the routine online stuff that distracts me from writing the ebook.

The other online things are not literally distractions—they’re other things that are either equally or more important than writing the ebook, but still they divert me from my writing (or what I am into, generally).

I am not saying that I am totally disorganized when I am online. Not at all! I do all my research and blogging work while being online. I have had no problems with my personal organization and productivity. But being online at least sets two expectations within me:

1. Sync with all servers (emails, drafts, and so on) or get updated.

2. Be alert not to get into online distractions. The very awareness to not get distracted while being online creates restlessness. I’m sure you’ve experienced this yourself.

My humble suggestion: take yourself offline once in a while and you’ll feel a great difference. Your body and mind will receive a great treat if you do so, and so will your productivity.

Jane writes on Blogging Tips, Relationships and Self Improvement at Find All Answers. She has a free ebook for you to grab.