I Unplugged for 10 Days: Part 3

Below is an account of my attempt to unplug completely from email and the internet for 10 days while on a stay-cation.  For those of you who haven’t heard the term, a stay-cation is a local vacation.

Day 1 of Unplugging – Friday, April 22 (Earth Day)

My official unplugging began at approximately 9:25 a.m.  I was visiting my best friend Lori (yes, we have the same first name) and checked email once last time.  Over the next 10 days, I recorded my thoughts and feelings on my digital recorder (since I was trying to unplug!) and later transcribed those comments for this blog

I am completely finished with any email I wanted to send and I feel great!  I feel like I’m in college and just finished finals.  I am REALLY looking forward to NOT looking at email and I am NOT worried about NOT looking at it.  I have taken my precautions.  I am SO looking forward to being done with email for 10 days because I am really tired and desperately want to unplug.

The challenge is that my goal is to unplug from the Internet, too.  My marketing consultant told me about an unplugging quiz that she suggested I take before and after my unplugging.  I haven’t yet had an opportunity to take the quiz yet, but I really want to.  Also, I have dinner scheduled with a friend on Monday and want to be sure I know how to get there.  I could always call my friend or the venue, but I’m sure both will send me to the web site.  I decide to worry about it later.  Perhaps I’ll quickly log on to the Internet one last time and take the quiz when I’m visiting my oldest sister Sharon today on the way home from my friend Lori’s …  But that will be the LAST time I plug in… I swear…

***

It’s now the evening of the first night.  It’s been easy not to get on email since I’ve been on the road from Pennsylvania to Maryland for a good part of the day.  The hard thing is to not look at email on my phone since I see that I’ve got emails to read.  I push the button as if I’m going to read the emails, but look away when it brings up the emails and quickly get out of email mode.  I do this because I want to keep setting the number of emails to read back to zero because at the end of the 10 days, I don’t want to see that I have 600 emails to read!  It will surely give me chest pains.  

I didn’t get a chance to take the unplugging quiz at my sister’s, and since my marketing consultant recommended I take it before and after my unplugging, I figure I better do this NOW!  So I got on the internet to take the quiz.  It didn’t make a lot of sense to me, so I won’t be taking the quiz at the end of my unplugging. Sigh.  I plugged back in on the very first day for nothing!!  Darn, darn, darn! 

Total time on the internet today:  about 20 minutes.