In one of my last posts before leaving on my trip abroad, I shared with you my goal of abstaining from email.  I am delighted to report that I was successful!  Now it’s your turn!

For three glorious weeks I neither wrote an email nor looked at an email.  I will admit that for the first week or so I still went online a few times, mainly to keep up-to-date on my favorite sports teams.  For the second two weeks, though, I spent the least amount of time that I ever have sitting in front of a computer.

The verdict- it was amazingly liberating and cleansing!  For three weeks my entire focus was on the real world, as opposed to the virtual world of computers.  My interactions with people were in person (a novel concept nowadays) and I loved it.  Naturally, since returning I’ve shifted back into checking my email numerous times per day and visiting those same few websites over and over.  However, I am doing my best to abstain from email on the weekends as a compromise, and I even hope to stay away from email after work as well.

Fighting against computers is an almost hopeless battle, but my few weeks away showed me the wonderful world of not staring at a screen for hours each day.  Now I just have to find that elusive middle ground.  Wish me luck!

I will be embarking on a trip abroad very shortly and I have decided that for the duration of my trip I will abstain from email.  My goal is to not check my email even once.  No reading any emails as well as no writing any emails!

This may not seem like such a big deal, but my trip isn’t a short one, and to venture a guess, I would say that for many of us the longest period of time spent without email is at most a couple of days.

Since mentioning this goal to my girlfriend (she is also going to make the same attempt) I have been reflecting on why it is so difficult for us to “get away”.  Are we afraid that we might miss out on news we can’t live without?  That someone might not be able to reach us (OMG)?

The same excuse is usually thrown around as the reason why we have to check our email, texts, or voicemail.  In case of an emergency, we want to be reachable!  Well, I don’t buy that excuse at all.  There are ways of ensuring that in case of a real emergency we are still reachable, and yes I will still be reachable on my trip.  Though you may have to go through my family to find me!

I have traveled abroad fairly extensively and I have always made numerous stops at Internet cafes to check my email.  I know it will be tough, but it’s a challenge that I’m looking forward to.

I am hoping to cleanse myself from staring at a computer all day, checking my email a million times, and visiting the same few websites over and over again.  I will let you know how it goes, but in the meantime I have to check my email!

Be it late at night, or on the weekend, there is a constant pressure to check our emails, to stay tuned in, to make sure we aren’t missing anything. I have been to movies, to dinners, to coffee, and everywhere I turn, the site is a similar one. People taking away from their interactions with others to fiddle with their Blackberries. My question then is WHY? I just don’t get it. Maybe that’s because I don’t have one myself, maybe it’s because I didn’t even have a cell phone until 2004 (seriously, I’m not lying!). Whatever the reason may be, I just don’t get it.

When I am out and about, I don’t need, and in fact I don’t want to check my email, surf the Internet, or Google chat. I want to enjoy attempting to live in the moment, which is already hard enough for me to do without another added distraction. I know the counter argument is that you can still enjoy what you are doing, and that may be true. But, how about for those around us? To the people we are spending time with? Are they still able to enjoy our company, when we are busy trying to multi-task: perhaps having a conversation, while writing an email, while waiting for yet another email. What would happen if we just put our Blackberries away and simply enjoyed being free from our email and the Internet? In most cases nothing would happen! What happened a few years ago, when most of us didn’t have them…

And it’s not just in our personal lives where the Blackberry phenomenon has taken hold. Over the past few months, I was in countless meetings where most of the people in the room were busy doing something on their Blackberries. Most likely, they were writing work emails (though you never know, seems like having a Blackberry provides an easy cover to do some browsing of the Internet, some on-line shopping, some chatting with friends- can’t you just see the Seinfeld episode here? just picture the trouble George would have gotten himself into with a Blackberry during meetings). Everyone is in their own world, instead of paying attention to the actual meeting. Result: long, drawn-out meetings, where not much gets accomplished (you could argue that this happens at most meetings anyway!).

To be fair, I have also been on the positive end of a Blackberry. When it comes to providing directions or the answer to a friendly (or not so friendly) wager, they are great!

Isn’t there the possibility, though, that we might be better off without them? At least when we are with others in our free time? Or is this to be our curse- never being able to unplug from the virtual world, and forgetting what human interactions without a mini-computer in our pocket are all about?