A Good Imagination and a Pile of Junk

I realized something today. Actually I’d mostly realized it yesterday but today I brushed the rest of the dirt off the idea.

The single best thing I can do for my life is to spend most of it away from a computer.

I’ve been experimenting with a cute little organizational system (I’ll post the link later, it’s really quite clever.) and it’s paper based. But I realized that I wasn’t even going near it while sitting…uhm… here.

So I took that notebook, cleaned off my coffee table and sat there on my couch while noodling around with it. One of the tasks was to send a particular email.

The second I sat down at the computer my mind went in to this bizarre “data absorption” mode, as though it was a challenge to see how many threads of distraction I could follow at once. It ended up being almost an hour and a half before the (6 line) email was sent.

When I shut off the monitor and walked back over and sat down the world was an entirely different shape (remarkably more world-shaped by any reasonable estimation.)

Sitting here, as I have for the last 32 years, I realize that a keyboard and monitor aren’t really external devices to me. It’s completely inside my head. Most of every thing that happens here is just marginally actuated daydreaming. None of it is really DOING anything.

So now that I’ve written this out, I’m going to go back and cross this “post something about the value of this new system” item off my (4 pages and growing) list, check my server logs, then turn off the monitor and go back over to the couch and on to some other thing.

o/

Tags: SIP

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