What I did immediately after the National Day of Unplugging

Mar 24, 2012 · 4 minute read · Comments
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The past 24 hours, I observed the National Day of Unplugging.

This is not a report on what I learned during that experience. I will be working on that report, which will probably be spread out over multiple posts.

This is a report of what I did, “plugged in”, right after the event ended.

What I immediately did after finishing the National Day of Unplugging

• Made a phone call to Abby, who has been in North Carolina since yesterday.
• Turned on my home computer.
• Announced on Facebook and Twitter that I was back from unplugging! (Funny that this is the first thing I did online.)
• Checked my emails: I have around 30 to deal with. That’s not bad, but I know that usually, I receive the least email on Saturdays.
• Started to “catch up” on my RSS feeds, Facebook, Twitter, Google+.

Emails I missed

• Notification about a Meetup event for tomorrow morning. If I had known about it earlier, I might have planned today differently. It is “too late” now to change tomorrow’s plans, so I will not be attending that event. (There is a different Meetup event I’m going to in the afternoon.)
• Notification about multiple Meetup events further in the future I may be interested in attending; need to look at the details and add to my online calendar if I decide to go.
• Party invitation on Facebook. This is why I can’t quit Facebook; people actually use it. Need to look at my online calendar and discuss with Abby.
• Continuing old and new email threads involving various friends; I need to catch up and participate.
• Notifications about new comments in my blog’s threads and other people’s blogs’ threads where I’d indicated I want to be notified; sometimes this is useful, but other times less so. I will respond promptly to the comment on my old blog post.
• Never-ending emails about new bills and statements I need to inspect and deal with.
• Notifications about a bunch of new people following me on Twitter. I’ve long since given up on looking up every single new follower (or unfollower). I do like to make note of Pittsburgh locals I may have met in person or should meet, however.
• Various mailing lists and other notifications.

Facebook

OK, so it took about 15 minutes to catch up on browsing Facebook. That’s actually longer than I expected. Typically I check Facebook once or twice a day, and I’ve imagined that I don’t spend more than 5 minutes a day on Facebook, but apparently I’m wrong. Interesting.

I believe I should spend less time on Facebook, because in reality, most of what I see there is not really necessary for me to see; it’s just idle people-watching for me, and the value of that is unclear to me.

Google+

I’ll be honest: I spend very little time on Google+. It’s just not where most people I know (as in “non-geeks”) are.

RSS feeds

Lots of articles to sort through. For fun, as I go through them to save those I cannot just skim in 15 seconds, but want to read in depth later, I am listing the topics of the saved ones here:

• Eclipse plugin for automatic Javadoc comments
• Improvised Persian music for Nowruz
• Claims that Twitter Bootstrap is the way to go for web site design
• Privacy and how to pay for it
• Formal mathematical model of film success or failure
• How to fix local issues: government or not?
• The stresses on women in today’s world
• Plight of the introvert
• Calibre and freedom for ebooks
• Guido and callbacks in Python
• A new blogging platform called Svbtle (sic)
• Collection of historical chess footage on YouTube

Saturday is a slow day. On a weekday I typically find more new stuff to read.

Twitter

Finally, I hit Twitter, to scroll down and see what I missed. I get tremendous value from Twitter, actually, that I cannot get from other sources. Perhaps that is the subject for a future blog post.

My new smartphone

I still need to get going on setting up and really using my new smartphone. This task may need to wait until Monday or Tuesday, since I have a lot of stuff I need to get done tonight and tomorrow.

Summary

I’ve talked about the first things I’ve done after getting back online. I’ll continue monitoring my online activities as they happen. One thing “unplugging” has done for me is give me (at least temporarily) a more conscious than usual awareness of what I do online. This will be a step toward streamlining my online activities.