Its been about a month since I last blogged. Even though I could have squeezed in the time to blog, I chose not to. As preposterous as it sounds, last month I decided to embark upon an experiment, wherein, I decided to forgo reading any blogs or blogging myself for a month.  I decided to forgo reading news, nyt, hacker news and techmeme as much as possible. My access to computers and Internet would be limited to what was required at work and nothing more.

So why did I, at the risk of alienating my readers, make such a drastic decision ?

Well, I needed to bring some order and focus into my life and make it less chaotic.  Before this hiatus, every free / spare moment of my time was spent reading news / blogs etc. It always seemed like a mad rush and frenzy – so little time and so many posts / news to catch up on.  What if I missed any important ones ?  I always felt stressed out for no reason. I felt compelled to blog. Not to mention that the number of distractions was slowly increasing – Twitter, FF etc. I was losing focus and suddenly priorities seemed irrelevant.

A total online burnout you can say !

While struggling to find an effective solution, I tried to read up on stuff related to increasing productivity, reducing stress, prioritizing etc. But nothing helped.  I realized that the only way out of this mess was to pull the plug and start with a clean slate. During this time off, I enjoyed doing other things that I’d stopped doing – coding, eating out, going out for movies, hanging out with friends, tennis etc. I started meditation (had been putting it off forever). For a month, I cared less about what Twitter was upto or what new startup had launched around Twitter. And I enjoyed the month just relaxing and being stress free. I also spent time contemplating on what I want to do next.

Now that the month long period is over, I’m back to blogging, but I’ve set some personal guidelines to keep things structured and hopefully I’m able to abide by these rules.  Prior to writing this post, I just hit the ‘mark all as read’ in my Google Reader and had no qualms about it (making progress already ). We’ll see how long I’m able to keep up, but I sure’ll give it my best shot.

Regular blogging should resume this week. And a big thanks to those who dropped in a note asking about my well being.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 3rd, 2009 at 12:48 pm and is filed under Personal. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.