Babu & Nubbins, New Year’s Eve 2012-13

Two summers ago, I went offline for a week.

Last spring, I went offline for 2 weeks. That was when we were in Costa Rica, so it was fairly easy. (I did make an exception for sending a few emails to my pediatrician-father when Emry spiked a high fever, and for using a web calculator to translate Celsius to Fahrenheit – that’s what technology is for after all). But no blogs. No online news. No Facebook or mindless, late-night website-hopping. No laptop, in fact.

This summer, I’ve already picked one week when I’ll be offline, and I’d like to do at least one other as well.

Now this article is making me think seriously about instituting a tech sabbath. It would be challenging, especially since I reliably do grantwriting work on the weekends, and I use weekends as catch-up time for paying bills, figuring out calendars and the myriad of other tasks I never get to during the busy weeks.

But, as life feels like it keeps accelerating, the idea of turning the switch to “off” for a whole day a week sounds more appealing to me.