Ask The Readers: Can You Disconnect And Still Be Productive?

Written by Andy Parkinson

Productivity

I hope everyone out there in the US enjoyed their Thanksgiving holiday! Many of us enjoyed a 4 day weekend away from work or our normal responsibilities. As for me, I spent all but about an hour completely disconnected from the Internet world. The greatest part was that there weren’t any of those nervous ticks that I might have expected. There wasn’t even a worry about missing anything. I came back online late Sunday night feeling pretty energized overall and got caught up on my non-email online activities within a 20 minutes or so (checking my Twitter stream, RSS reader, etc.)

Coming back from a (mostly) online-free 4 days made me realize how much time is wasted every day checking and rechecking stuff for no good reason. It made me wonder if it was possible, or productive, to have more days where I greatly reduce my usage of the Internet… Or maybe even cut it out entirely!

What do you think? Is there any additional productivity to be gained from unplugging the modem for a day or two a week and forcing yourself to focus on only the important stuff in your life? Has anyone tried it? If so, what are the results? If not, would you? Please discuss :)

  • Geri
    Absolutely! I find that to get anything written I need to unplug. I'm a grad student, and I find that when I sit down to write, there is always one more citation I need to check out before I can write. Unplugging allows me to get my thoughts on paper (or into Onenote at least!) and I can check out the citation afterwards.
    A friend of mine recommends starting the day unplugged, even if just for an hour, and getting stuck into an important task right away. The task gets done mainly because you focus on it before the barrage of communications via email rss twitter etc.
    Unplugging definitely helps - but I start to get anxious if I'm unplugged for more than a couple of hours!
  • There are 2 problems with being plugged in all the time - you physically spend a lot of time checking and re-checking, and you are are always keeping part of your attention focused on your inbox, twitter client and cellphone.

    Unplugging is a very useful way of getting away from those distractions and re-energising as well as getting a good chunk of work done. Perhaps that is what drives the energising? being productive is a great morale boost.

    Personally I like to unplug for a couple of afternoons a week. Often I'll take my laptop along to a cafe and get my head down to working, and I find I have to unplug to get my weekly review done.
  • Amazing that the internet goes on when we're not there. And so do our lives when we're not online. Maybe someday that won't be the case, but for now it's not so damaging to spend time away...just the opposite seems to be the case.

    And with that, I'm going to shut down--it's 6:00. (let's see how long I last...)
  • Oh, dramatically productive.

    I've learned to force myself to download everything I think I'll need and unplug (well, turn off the wireless). I get WAY more done in these bursts of dedicated time.

    I started on this habit because I travel frequently between cities on the bus - no Internet. So I set up Mail.app to download all my mail and then I'd sit on the bus and crank through tonnes of emails, setting them all to send when I next connected. I'd have a few videos on tap and I use Instapaper to cache articles I've been meaning to read and voila! Bus trips that were often more productive than being at the office.

    So having learned my lesson, I now make a point of doing this at home as well. I'll take some time to prepare my computer and then go to a coffee shop WITHOUT wireless and crank through tasks.
  • Hello Geri, James, Jared and Tim,

    Thanks for the great responses. Sounds like its a concept worth more experimentation. I like the idea of taking afternoons offline a couple times a week. Maybe I'll toy with that some more. I'll report back the results!

    Thanks again! And I hope the conversation keeps going. I'm really enjoying the feedback!
  • Absolutely a good habit to have. One of my favorite tricks at work is to book myself a conference room where I'm away from my phone and turn off my wireless. Either that or if it's a nice day I'll go sit on the deck and work while listening to some tunes. Even though I've gotten pretty good at minimizing the electronic distractions by now, sometimes the best way to keep yourself from doing something is to just make it impossible (or at least severely inconvenient) to do it.

    @Tim: I recently did the same thing on a flight back from a conference. That was far and away the fastest I've ever plowed through 300+ e-mails... and I didn't dread going back to work the next day so much!
  • Absolutely not! My internet has been cutting in and out these past few days and it has caused me much distress. More then I even realized I depended on the internet. I thought that I didn't rely on the internet as much as I do. I really need to find a way to cut down on my reliance.
  • Disconnecting is absolutely vital to work. I schedule one no-internet-no-computer day ever two weeks. It's sometimes surprising how much I get done on those day and how different the 'real' world can look.
  • if you read zenhabits you will find a lot of productivity by just doing nothing, or doing something more slowly
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