Drunken Owls and Other Delights

So yeah...come to find out that the answer to wishing I could go back to the days when I wasn't beholden to the Great Internet for hours at a time and got All The Writing done (read: late 90s, early 00s) is rather simple.

Close the damn browsers.

The hard part was breaking the habit. I realized it wasn't the sites I was addicted to, it was their payoff -- the dumpster fire of politics, the indignation of injustices, and so on. I was actively searching for this stuff to get the emotional response, just like the Yankee Candle and HMV days when I'd look forward to my breaks so I could light up a smoke.* The funny thing is that I understood this back in those days too, because I'd purposely stopped watching TV and gotten myself into the habit of hitting the PC at 7pm every night without fail. The payoff there was hitting a thousand words or more a night.

So what's different this time?

I think this time it's because I let the habits run their course. I saw the futility in futzing around online, hopping from one site to another like I was crossing off a shopping list. Check email, read web comics, Twitter, Facebook, news, political websites, YouTube, rinse lather repeat. Did I really need to be doing this all day long? Was I really seeing anything different? It just seemed so futile and wasteful after awhile.

Granted, I think there's also better time management going on, especially now that I understand the ups and downs of self-publishing more. I don't have time to waste watching silly videos or social media dumpster fires when I have things I need to get done. [I wish I'd have taken this tack during my school years, I'd have been a much better student.]

In the process, I've given myself new habits. Some of them are kind of silly and lightweight, but they're helping me keep this new life setting. Reverting to the old FreeCell habit instead of hitting Twitter (as I'd said elsewhere, a five minute game is better than a half hour wasted refreshing a feed). Resizing the document I have open so I can see the wallpaper behind it (it's a view of a sunset that I shot out Spare Oom window). Getting up from the desk and noodling on my guitar for a few minutes, just to stretch my legs and clear my head. Drinking less soda and more water.

And the best one so far: closing the browser. Sure, I'll pop on now and again to see what's going on, or to post on one of my blogs, or to look something up. But once I'm done with that, then I'll close it. I'll even minimize everything that remains open (mainly MS Word, Media Monkey, and/or whatever web station I happen to be listening to). Clean screen, clear mind.

Happy to say, it's working just fine so far. :)


* - There's actually a TED talk out there (yes, I do watch some of them for fun) that touches on this exact thing, worth checking out.