Read about the experiment here. I started last Thursday, and it’s Saturday now.

• I am enjoying life with less Internet. I feel a tiny but perceptible change in mental state. Actually there hasn’t been much difference there, yet. But I thought I would feel bereft without the constant stimulation and flow of information, and I don’t. It’s mostly nice. I feel a little befuddled, as if there are lots of conversations going on around me that I can’t hear—I can just hear the buzz—but that mostly doesn’t bother me.
• I turned off my e-mail notification and set the program to download new messages every 15 minutes instead of every 3. So when I am typing an e-mail or a reply, I don’t get distracted when something new comes in.
• I have also been reading the daily Writer’s Almanac e-mails more regularly, and more mindfully, rather than letting them pile up, vowing to “get to them later,” then reading them in a mad rush because my inbox feels too cluttered.
• There are some kinks to work out, though. Because I am setting a limit on how long I spend online, I find myself very stressed and rushed for that hour, trying to get everything done. It’s not even that an hour isn’t enough, it’s just having the feeling that the clock is ticking that makes me feel like I’m running to catch up. I’m not sure quite how to manage this, because if I do away with the time limit, I could see myself easing back into Massive Time Suck mode.
• I also occasionally have lapses. I was thinking about some publicity for the Harry Potter series and wondered whether an owl would work as a graphic. So I hopped online to look up owls as religious symbols, and found that the owl is in fact associated with gnostic Christianity, and with the folkloric story about Adam’s other wife, Lilith. OK, not so much. But that was very much an pre-experiment behavior. It was fine because it’s not like I emerged an hour later nowhere close to where I’d started. Still, I did notice it when I did it. It felt weird.
• I also think that feed readers are a blessing and a curse. Blessing because you don’t spend time going to a site that hasn’t changed. Curse because when a site is flagged as unread, it’s hard for me not to check it right then, even if I don’t really feel like it. I have folders for sites I read daily, weekly, and occasionally, and still this is a challenge. I may do away with the site reader if and when the experiment ends; I haven’t decided.