First, the winners of Leslie and Ellen's books from Wednesday are:
Anne Mason (send your mailing address to jennmck at yahoo dot com) -- Mardi Gras Murder by Ellen Byron!!!
It all started with an upgrade to my cell phone. One of the new features was a weekly accounting of how much screen time I was accumulating. When the first numbers came up, I thought it had to be an exaggeration or maybe the cat was using my phone when I was asleep. Because, surely, there was NO WAY I was racking up four hours a day online. How could that be when I only use my phone for quick research questions and occasional forays into social media. Yeah, those forays were turning into bottomless pits, and I was sinking fast.
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| My book came out this week, so it's been higher than normal - I swear! |
I started to pay attention to my time management and realized that I slid over into the Twitterverse, Instagramlandia, FacebookNation, or, heaven help me, Redditdom, whenever the words got hard. So, on a good day that’s every other paragraph and on a bad day it’s every other word. It occurred to me that I needed to find something to do that would stop the auto response of Gosh, writing is hard work so I’ll avoid it by hitting the cyber water cooler.
First, I tried eating, because of course I did. I wore a path from my desk to the pantry and back. After a five pound gain from a steady diet of Cheez-its and Oreos, I decided this was not the best laid plan. Then I thought I’d do some yoga, get my chakra aligned and learn to focus. What I learned was how to nap, sitting up, in the lotus position. This called for desperate measures, which meant, you guessed it, cleaning.
While trying to avoid a slip and slide journey into the Interwebs, I decided to clean my desk. I found a cache of little used gel pens from some Christmas card project years ago. I was certain they must all be dried out. I tested each one by drawing a line which turned into a scribble that morphed into a doodle. Ah ha! I knew I had found my new stop gap from falling into the electronic rabbit hole. When the words got stuck I would use my happy glitter pens to doodle. I thought about getting a coloring book but I know me. My oppositional defiance disorder, a very mild case, didn’t like to have to stay within the lines so doodling was most def the way to go.
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| Jenn's procrastidoodling |
So, here I am a month and a half later with a notebook full of a doodles AND a daily screen time total that is less than half of what it was. I’m down to one and a half to two hours per day of screen time. Huzzah! I don’t know how long the doodling will keep me occupied but so far so good.
So, how do you stay out of the cyber rabbit hole, Reds and Readers? Or have you just embraced the free fall?
