Secular Sabbath

Mark Bittman wrote this great article in the NY Times, published yesterday. He suggests the idea of a Secular Sabbath, one day per week without technology. He takes it to what I would consider the extreme by turning off pretty much everything electronic: PDA, cell phone, laptop, and TV. I would love to work up to that stage at some point, but the reality is that I need to do schoolwork and that mostly happens on the weekends and usually involves my laptop and sometimes the internet.

But I would love to start by having 24-hours a week without the internet. There was a point last week when I was checking my email pretty constantly, for really no good reason, and sadly enough, not much (or no) email was appearing in my inbox. I realized at some point that I could be much more productive if I could just ignore the draw of refreshing my inbox to see if anyone had replied to my emails, or even more exciting, emailed me out of the blue! So at work, I decided that instead of leaving my email open and ready to receive messages at any given moment, that I would only check it every 2 hours. This worked out well. And if I can manage it, I'd prefer to check my email just once (OK maybe twice) while I'm home in the evening. I've been doing this for a few days, and it's working out.

I don't know if I could go 24-hours without the cell phone, though. That's really taking it to another level that I don't think I'm quite ready for, yet. Again, the weekend is when I catch up with far away friends while I have those precious free minutes, at this point that would be hard for me to give up.

So slowly but surely, I'm hoping to reduce my "screentime". I don't know if I'll make it all the way to what Bittman would consider a Secular Sabbath, but if you call one Sunday and I don't pick up, don't assume the worst, just imagine me enjoying a good book or taking a walk and leaving the technology behind.