Breaking the Internet Addiction

Thankfully I’ve never become addicted to anything serious like drugs, alcohol or street racing. But I have been addicted to more boring things like television, radio, email… and now RSS feeds have rekindled my Internet addiction.

So as I’m interesting in where my addiction will be displaced to next, I’ve decided to deal with my Internet addiction.

So how does one do that?

Usually with an addiction I would just give it up cold turkey. By completely giving something up for a month, you break the habits and false yourself to find other ways of behaving.

But I need the Internet. I don’t mean that in some kind of addicts I ‘need’ one last hit, kinda way. I actually do need it for work. Eventually I’d like to try giving it up for a month, to force me to communicate in other ways, but it’s really not a good idea at the moment.

So instead I’m giving it up in the mornings.

Except on very odd occasions where I have something urgent to complete, the Internet is not needed in the mornings. I can do research, check email, publish what I’ve written and so on, all in the afternoon. That leaves me to concentrate on writing in the morning.

So I’ve been experimenting with this. I’m still sitting at the computer, with the connection to the Internet still live, and only a click away from opening up the Firefox browser. But I’m being really good and resisting the urge to go hit the Internet waves.

And there certainly is an urge. In fact I’m getting withdrawal symptoms. There are moments lasting 10/15 minutes where I’m not getting any work done because I’m convincing myself not to surf the Internet!

In these early days I’m full of excuses for why I ‘need’ to use the Internet (and now I do mean an addict’s need). A couple of situations are legitimate, but I have to be really careful about what I convince myself is important enough to bend the ‘no morning’ rule and what is not. Therefore if I decide that I need to use the Internet, I make sure I spend ten minutes trying to convince myself otherwise.

For the few hours this probably slowed me down quite considerably, but it’s already starting to pay back in productivity. I’m getting much more work done in the morning. In fact I’m generally finishing more in the morning than I used to in a whole day!

So far a big success then!

Start as you mean to go on

Only a short while ago I trained myself to get up at 6:30am every day (yes even Sundays). While doing so, I didn’t want to give myself any reason to not get up when I asked myself to, so I made sure I started the day doing something I really enjoyed. In my case this was checking my RSS feeds for fascinating new posts and articles.

While there is a lot of good reading in those RSS feeds, I tend to read more than necessary if I start at the beginning of the day. They’re a tad addictive

Now that I’ve got the habit of getting up early down, I’ve now forming the habit of starting the day in a more productive manner. So within ten minutes of my alarm going off, I’m now revising.

The absolutely wonderful benefit of this is that once I’m in work mode I tend to stay there. Sure, it’s pretty easy to slack off, but not as hard as starting something in the first place. So just making a small improvement in the morning has actually improved my entire day. It used to be that I repeatedly slacked off from my work in order to surf the net. I’m not doing that anymore; or at least not nearly as much. Consequently I’m finishing work early and having completly free evenings. (I used to work until bedtime.)

Try it for yourself. Form the habit of starting the day perfectly by making a plan and starting every day in the same way for 30 days in a row.

Start the day as you mean to go on.