Still alive! Barely.

Where I live
(photo by me!)

Every now and then someone will announce on a social media site that I follow that they are taking a break. They'll say they're sick of some annoying aspect of Facebook or Twitter etc. Eventually they come back, declare themselves refreshed by the absence and pretty much pick up where they left off. I've occasionally thought I should do the same thing, but I never have. I realize that I engage in social media for the same reasons as everyone else, and a little bit of self awareness about how much time I spend on social media isn't going to change any of the reasons I signed up in the first place.

For the last 9 months or so I've been working on a significant project at work, one that has grown steadily harder to keep up with as we approach our May deadline. In the month leading up to Christmas, my Instapaper backlog grew from essentially nothing to about 200 links, and the unread article count on Google Reader crested 600. Thanks to the Christmas holidays and some judicious purging, I managed to get the backlog down to almost nothing once more. After the Christmas holidays, things started to get really out of hand. I started bringing work home with me in the evenings. I started doing work from home on the weekends. Time I had been spending unwinding with  Instapaper and then going to bed turned into time to catch up on work.

I knew there was a problem with my habit of reading every tweet in my timeline, something I could stop for totally unpretentious reasons. But it was addictive, and even as the project grew in intensity, I was gamely opening the Twitter app on my phone and noticing I was over a day behind. It was fun at times to tweet replies to people on topics they had long since forgotten about, but generally I could feel myself disengaging - responding to something from 12 hours ago makes your comment stick out like a sore thumb, so instead I just stopped responding to tweets and Facebook conversations that I would once have been quick to join.

The straw that broke the camel's back came when I got a new phone and didn't have time to install any apps on it. The Twitter app I eventually found the time to install had some weird issue where it was destroying my battery life, so I shut it off until I could find time to sort it out, which was weeks later. Occasionally something would happen, or I'd snag a cute photo of the kids, and I'd post a status update but I had no idea what anyone else was talking about over that near week of being unplugged. I finally got a chance to sort out the phone, and to check up on Facebook (I hadn't read anyone's status updates there in about 3 weeks, it turns out). Then I fell right back into the black hole.

This is the part where most people say "I'm such a better person!" and "I don't miss it!" but I totally do. I know some day this project will be over and I'll be able to get right back into things. I will not have fresh perspective, I will not consider it cleansing. I really feel like I'm out of the loop. In fact, I've made a list of all the things I miss about being out of the social media loop:

News from friends
This is kind of a no-brainer. Being parents of small kids means you don't actually see your friends very often. But you can keep up with them through social media. I have no idea what's going on in my friends' lives right now.

Breaking news
You would think that someone in my line of work would be totally plugged into to current events, but because of the project I'm almost totally out of the loop. In the early phases of the project at work, I was alerted to important news through Twitter (the big proportion of people I follow on Twitter are journalists). Now that I'm not monitoring Twitter, I know that Dick Clark died and that's about it.

Municipal events
I really paid no attention to local Toronto politics for the first decade or so that I lived in the city. That changed slightly when Rob Ford was elected mayor. He's done a huge amount for civic engagement among Torontonians! But when I started following City Hall reporters and observers, I really dialed in to local goings on.

Project ideas
There are so many interesting people doing interesting things on social media, that it constantly inspired me to try new things, especially with computers. Being unplugged from that stream of inspiration hurts that creative side a lot, as does the fact that when I'm not working, I don't want to look at a computer if I can avoid it!

So. I've decided to take some time to write this blog post and update my Flickr stream (coming soonish!) If you've wondered what's happened to me, I'll be back. Probably sometime over the summer, when the project winds down.

I miss you all. Really.