Difficult decisions

Hello. My name is Joan. And I'm addicted to the Internet.

{sigh}

Now is the time that tries a writer's soul. If you're a writer, you know what time I mean. The time when it seems as if you'll never, ever, finish your work in progress. Yep. I'm there. So I've looked over my available time--the usual 24 hours we all have--and have kept a log for a week now in which I've tried to determine where those hours and my energy go.

The good news is I now know how much time I spend at my daily activities.

The bad news is that too much of my time is spent on the Net, keeping up with all the news on all the lists to which I'm subscribed. In the beginning, this was just a few lists. Now, it's more than two dozen. Even though I'm on digest, this takes a lot of time even though some lists don't post every day. They are balanced by the lists that have multiple digests each day. Even though I mostly lurk, I realize now that the lists and the blogs I read have taken over my free time as well as my writing time.

Sooooo.... I've made the difficult decision to back away from the web. I bit the bullet, notified some of the lists to send me private email if they needed me, and then I clicked NO MAIL on all my lists. I nearly broke out in a cold sweat thinking about mornings without dozens of emails and digests, but I did it anyway.

I'll keep up with this blog and let you know if this makes a significant difference in my writing output. So if you too have begun to suspect too much time is spent keeping up with the online writing community, I'll let you know if this is an improvement.

Sling Words out.