Normally, I spend a lot of time online. I am purely a distance education student at OSU, so when classes are in session, I do a lot of my schoolwork online. Even without school, I am online a lot, visiting my favorite message boards, reading my favorite websites and blogs, updating my personal blog, tinkering with my business website, and shopping online. The internet is my connection to the outside world.
For a little background, I am the mother of nine children. Four of them, my sons from my first marriage (ages 21, 19, 16, and 13), are currently living with/near their dad (my ex-husband) in the Seattle area. In addition to phone calls and text messages, I check their MySpace pages on a regular basis, and they read my personal blog. My younger five children (ages 8, 6, 4, 2, and 1) live with me and my second husband in Nebraska. I am very restrictive about the internet when it comes to the little ones, and none of them are allowed to be online without me, my husband, or a teacher supervising them. In addition to being a mom, I own a machine quilting business, with my company website as my primary method of contact for future customers. I am also in the middle of coordinating a team of bicyclists who will be doing the RAGBRAI (Register's Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa) next month, while I will be taking my oldest daughter (age 8) to a national baton-twirling competition the same week. Yes, I was supposed to be doing RAGBRAI, too, but I didn't learn the dates of the competition until after I volunteered to be the team lead. Needless to say, I am a very busy person, and the internet is what I use to connect to everyone.
I will admit that I use the internet to "talk" to people partly because five young children are incapable of being quiet long enough for me to talk on the phone. But that's another story. :)
Fortunately for us, we were able to choose our 24-hour period of abstinence. I chose mine to occur at a time when I knew things would be slow in my life. I didn't want to miss anything important, such as business leads or important cycling updates. Tuesday night, I sent a quick e-mail to my sons about my upcoming absence from the internet, and I added a short post to my personal blog (which is mostly read by my family and friends). I read a book before going to bed that night.
First thing Wednesday morning, I reached for my laptop to check the day's weather, but I remembered my assignment and stopped. Instead, I had my daughter check the Weather Channel, since she's very interested in meteorology, and she loves having any excuse to change to that channel. Around that time, my baby walked in. She's 13 months old and hasn't been feeling well lately. I snuggled with her for a little while, then I helped everyone get dressed to take Rhiannon to her twirling lesson. After she returned, I fed everyone lunch and continued to read my books. My husband came home around 2 p.m., since he was very upset about his assignment to Tacoma, Washington, being cancelled by the Air Force. Normally, I would have jumped on my computer to update my blog about that, but as the day went on, I found that I enjoyed not being online that day. After driving to my Guard unit to sign some papers, I came home, fed the kids dinner, then went upstairs to quilt while the rest of the family watched one of the Indiana Jones movies. Once the kids went to bed for the night, I continued quilting for a little while. By then, my 24 hours were over, but I didn't feel like getting my laptop out of my backpack. I just went to bed.
Thursday morning, I went back to my old habits.
What did I learn from this experience? Well, I spend way too much time online. I suspected that going into this assignment, but what surprised me was how little I missed it. I stopped spending hours delving into my favorite message boards, and those same communities went on without me. I didn't really miss much. In my younger days, my mom and I used to watch soap operas. We noticed that even if we went on vacation and didn't watch for weeks, it was incredibly easy to catch up on what we missed. That's how I felt Thursday morning. I really didn't miss much, but I gained a lot of time for other things in my life. I was able to finish two difficult quilt blocks, in addition to spending time with my family and reading my textbooks. I might not have been able to finish those blocks if I had been online all day, and they were due Thursday night (for a quilt club I belong to).
Now, as a small business owner, I was taking a risk by being offline even for a day. I know from personal experience that a non-responsive business owner may lose business; I have e-mailed more than one business owner in the past, looking for information, and the one who wrote back to me fastest was usually the one who earned my business. In today's world, customers expect almost instant gratification, and a few hours can mean the difference between a new customer and a lost contact. Fortunately for me, nobody e-mailed me about my quilting services during my internet abstinence.
All in all, this has been a good experience for me. I am looking forward to more mini-vacations from my internet addiction.
