Avoid distractions, practice internet fasting

Civilization is built in free time

Technology is the capstone of human civilization. At the advent of civilization we learned to use fire. We learned to cook. And cooking made the nutritions available to our body in less time and effort. This gave us time to think about other things, like art, culture and technology. We can now save a lot of our time using the technology. We can shop online, we can go places in cars or by trains. These all save our time and give us more time to think about us and to think about other ideas.

Now distractions are eating our time

On the other hand humans build habits, they are prone to classical conditioning. Today we are doped with the connecting technology. In the same way the over-nutrition caused us to become overweight and predisposed to some diseases; the overuse of social networking sites and internet made us occupied with social thoughts. We certainly lost our ability to wait and the ability to pursue a goal for a long time. Our personal tasks are overshadowed by the thoughts of society, politics and news-channels. The internet has made it easy to create and publish more information. Our desire for more online information caused information anxiety. And provided that anxiety we used up a lot of time gathering those informations. This resulted in reduced productive time and increased procrastinations.

Time is short and attention is limited resource

Life is short. This makes our attention limited. So we need to choose what we care most. We need to have a plan. And we need a sense of control. There are people who use the laws of economy to understand attention. And they call it attention economy. I find it very interesting.

Know thyself

In the earlier blog I talked about self profiling. We can use that profiling to measure the outcome of a month. In this way we can find what we are lacking and what we are overusing.

Formulating the solution

As I figured out that I spend a lot of time online, I formulated a simple solution. Too many of things are bad. Like in old days saints abstained themselves from food, we need to practice austerity using internet. It is like internet-fasting. We need to practice a ‘no-internet-day’ to edify our ability to think of ourselves.