An analog holiday

This past Christmas I spent one week at a cabin on an island to get away from the Internet. I needed time to concentrate on my writing, and it was the only way I could truly shut down the distraction, even though I’ve already taken measures that some people would think extreme to lessen the constant stream of information we all deal with everyday.

My phone is a five-year-old Android that’s great for calls, texts, and checking email, but doesn’t have any apps or access to social media (I may have sidestepped the great Facebook identity heist this way, at least on some level). I don’t have a TV, or Netflix, so if I want to watch a TV show or a movie, I download it from iTunes and pay for it. Not because I love paying for stuff that everyone else on the planet gets for almost nothing, but because if I didn’t build this obstacle I would literally do nothing else with my free time.

But when I’m at home, the Internet is there all the time, and as a chronic procrastinator, it is often the thing that stands between me and several good hours of writing. So in December I rented a cabin overlooking a lovely sea cove, where I could observe harbour seals (turns out they spend long periods of time just hanging out underwater, perfectly still) go for long walks, read and write. It was an artificial construct that will never apply to my daily life, but it was bliss, and has made me think about how I can diminish distraction in the future. I have a few ideas.