I know I’m spending too much time writing and reading. Having been here before in the past, I know that things like work, life and relationships start suffering in favor of writing and spending time reading articles. With that said, I’ve decided to put some restrictions on myself to help alleviate any problems before they’re actually problems.
Post Limits
Starting this Thursday, I’m going to publish a post every Monday and Thursday. Thursday’s post will be the regular Three Things Thursday and Monday’s post will be something related to whatever fired me up or I found interesting from the week before. I can take a few hours on the weekend to concentrate the post instead of having 3-5 posts only partially done at any given time.
Reading Hours
Feeling that reading blogs has started to take more and more of my free time, I’m scheduling 1-hour blocks on various days through the week to read and comment on blogs. It will be a fundamental shift in what I’ve been doing the last several months and comments will be made only when I have something substantive to add; otherwise a simple “Like” will be made after reading something.
Daily/Weekly Digests
Most of the blogs I follow email me as posts are published. It was fine when I only followed 10-20 blogs, but now I’m following almost 100 of them and it takes a large amount of time to work through 200 emails in my inbox sometimes. Starting this weekend, I’m going to be switching to daily/weekly digest emails so that all posts from an author are consolidated in one email per day or week depending on frequencies. What this means is that “Likes” and comments will come in groups rather than trickle in as they have been.
Since deleting my Facebook account, my Twitter use has increased steadily over the last several weeks. I still have not decided how I’m going to limit my use of Twitter as I’ve been using it more and more as a news aggregator and following publications rather than people. I may decide that it doesn’t require limits, just simply turning off the notification on my phone/desktop app may be all that is required. More thought on this is needed.
Suggestions
I’m open to suggestions that might help and open to hearing what has worked or not worked for you. I know I’m not the only one that has had this issue and been forced to make some changes to their technology consumption. Thankfully I’ve caught it in time as it hasn’t affected anything too serious yet.
Life Between 0 and 1 
I can understand where you are coming from….I am fortunate that there is no one home but me and I have had to retire so my time is all about research and writing…I look forward to your comments when appropriate….chuq
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A person has to do what a person has to do and these kinds of decisions are necessary if we are ever to discover what works and what does not.
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Couldn’t have said it better myself 🙂
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I only do the daily digests for my fav blogs, which is less than 40. Even if I’m a week late reading (as usual lately), I do get to them. Others I try to get to in the reader when I’m sitting in the car rider line, but don’t sweat it if I don’t. Like you said, it’s impossible to keep up with everything, gotta find a good balance.
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My problem is the opposite for the most part–I’m mostly off-line and then when I should be writing stories, I spend hours playing catch up. Thankfully, I’m implementing a new schedule next week (three day weekends always screw me up) and will try to restrict blog reading to 1 hour or less 5 days a week. Writing blogs are different–still working on the best approximate amount of time there. But I’m trying to expand and look at other people’s blogs and leave comments, so I’ll be making sure to look at 5 new posts every day on whatever topic I want to see. That way I also don’t repeat what’s already been put out there too much, also (hee hee).
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Seems we’re both working on stream lining what can easily be an all consuming effort. Writing for me is cathartic, usually having multiple subjects in partial completion at any given time. Some subjects that I get passionate and fired up about, I can bang out 1,000 words in under 15 minutes. It’s the reading that is time consuming. Hope you’re new schedule works out, mine already requires some adjustment 🙂
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