on disconnecting distraction

Just over a year ago, Paul Graham wrote an essay on distractions. He recounts how he had come to the realization that the Internet had become such a big distraction that he now considered it an addiction that affected his work.

This piece struck a chord with me because I’ve been struggling with the same issue for the past several years. As with all issues, the first step is recognizing the problem—self awareness. When do you know you are addicted to something? I like the way Richard Foster puts it in his book, Celebration of Discipline:

How do you discern an addiction? Very simply, you watch for undisciplined compulsions.

In his book, he goes on to illustrate this point by telling the story of a friend who one day, realizing that his newspaper did not get delivered, started to scheme up ways he could steal his neighbor’s. At this point he realized he was addicted and cancelled his subscription. His addiction made him consider behaving in a way he knew to be wrong.

I know from my own life I can apply the same logic to my own addiction to checking online statuses. Rather than focusing on my children in the evening before bedtime, I feel the need to check my email, or twitter. These are things that can be left for other times, yet I have to fight the compulsion.

And yet these things are not inherently bad, and are needed to conduct my business. Graham well articulates this scenario in his essay:

The problem is a hard one to solve because most people still need the Internet for some things. If you drink too much, you can solve that problem by stopping entirely. But you can’t solve the problem of overeating by stopping eating. I couldn’t simply avoid the Internet entirely, as I’d done with previous time sinks.

And that is the crux of the issue. As the internet enables more and more people to work in new ways, it simultaneously gives them new ways to waste their time. I’m curious to see, as more people begin to recognize the issue at hand, different ways people attempt to resolve the problem.

What did Graham do? He disconnected. He still has a computer for surfing, emailing etc., but his main work computer is no longer ‘on the grid’.

And my main computer is now freed for work. If you try this trick, you’ll probably be struck by how different it feels when your computer is disconnected from the Internet. It was alarming to me how foreign it felt to sit in front of a computer that could only be used for work, because that showed how much time I must have been wasting.

That sounds like a pretty good start.

[ via slansai ]