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Perhaps I succeeded. I took my morning walk, completed my schoolwork adequately, did not touch my work laptop, and did not read any B.S. Per the external measures, indeed along the limited "productivity" measures, today was a success.
Unfortunately, as I gemlogged yesterday, there is more to the picture. The base line for a successful day in the life isn't tasks completed, but satisfying basic biological requirements. I did eat breakfast and lunch appropriately, but dinner proved a bit of a train wreck. For privacy reasons I'm not comfortable detailing the specifics, but there was an issue with the scheduled takeout meal that proved stressful. In the end I did eat, but not without spinning my gears and using up my spoons for the evening.
This condition is reflected in my email access log for the day, which I am posting as promised. Times should be accurate, although my actual log contains some annotations that are redacted here for privacy:
Nov 4
8:40 - 8:58
Nov 5
7:16 - 7:20
11:19 - 11:24
12:20 - 12:26
1:16 - 1:18
2:05 - 2:05
3:00 - 3:07
4:00 - 4:01
4:45 - 4:46
5:30 - 5:31
6:23 - 6:28
6:36 - 6:38
7:19 - 7:23
7:36 - 7:36
In a period of less than twenty-four hours, I checked my email _fourteen times_ and spent about an hour reading or responding to personal and university email.
Yikes.
Knowing I would post the log later, I had self-restraint as an explicit goal, which makes me tremble imagining the statistics for other days. Should I consider these numbers dreadfully high and an indictment of my Internet habits? Or should I be satisfied that they are 'only' this low, considering I transceive more email now that I am no longer active on XMPP? In particular, I spent around fifteen minutes of the hour exchanging email with a friend, and time spent catching up with a dear friend is not wasted at all. Another fifteen minutes was replying to email from fellow Gemini astronauts; given I spend far more than fifteen minutes composing my daily gemlog, and it is some of the most meaningful time of my day, this seems like reasonable overhead. Another fifteen minutes or so was life admin provoked by email.
Overall, the overhead in time is regrettable but not worth losing sleep over. The bigger issue is the checking. Fourteen checks a day is unacceptable, full stop. I intend to post a similar mail log tomorrow, with a goal of reducing this number.
More to the point, multiple records in the full time log are annotated as having received no new mail or only spam. So why check so often?
As mentioned I had some issues with self-regulation in the evening due to real life circumstances outside of my control, beginning around 5:15 in the evening. Between 5:15 and 7:45, I checked my email five times. It's problematic that reading email is a pacifier for the overwebbed brain, but compared to the emotions of the night, this is bikeshedding.
On the other hand, I took a long walk in the morning, accounting for a wonderful four hour stretch spent offline. Once I plugged back into the Internet, I was back to checking email hourly.
I did not receive a single urgent email all day.
I can't remember the last time I received an email so urgent it could not wait twenty-four hours to read.
Hourly checking is pointless. In contrast to the trance reading B.S. on the web, for me this is not a significant waste of a time; opening an empty inbox is fast enough that reading email only once a day would not save much wall clock time. Nevertheless the pervasive urge to check does indicate a bug in my psychology.
I'm reticent to call this Internet addiction, because if this is addiction, the majority of North America is struggling with addictions far more problematic than spending a minute per hour refreshing email. I still want to drive that number down, and more importantly, be free from the _need_ to open my inbox.
(I'm also reticent to overuse the term "checking", a clinically significant obsessive behaviour which is distinct from the issue here.)
The crux of the issue, I admit, is that on some level I _enjoy_ reading and writing email. Maybe that isn't a bad thing inherently. Still, typing `mutt` is not just a pacifier or a time filler for the bored, but something I have been conditioned to treat as a reward for myself.
Why should speculating on new information be a reward? Is this my own fault for an unhealthy attitude with even basic text-only technology?
Or has the web's psychological manipulation punctured my brain even deeper than I realized?