Three Weeks Completely Offline Showed Me What I Had Been Doing to My Attention

The three weeks were not chosen - they were circumstantial. A trip to Scotland for a family matter, a mobile contract that did not work across the border as expected, a decision not to sort the data situation immediately that extended by inertia into a genuine offline period.

For the first four days I was restless in a way that I had not experienced since childhood - a directionless, seeking quality to my attention that kept reaching for something that was not there.

I caught myself, on the morning of the third day, picking up my phone seven times in an hour with no particular purpose - not to call anyone, not to check anything specific, but in the specific automatic reach of someone whose hand has learned that the phone is what you do when you have a free moment.

Each time I put it down without having done anything. By day five something had shifted in a way I found difficult to describe precisely. My attention had slowed down. Not in the sense of moving less efficiently but in the sense of having more of it available for whatever I was doing.

I was in Bristol on day six visiting my aunt and I was present for the entire conversation in a way that I recognised, slightly startlingly, as different from how I was usually present for conversations - without the background monitoring, the occasional half-absent moment, the slight always-readiness to respond to something incoming.

I was simply there, completely, for the full two hours. I started noticing the quality of the thinking I was doing in the offline period. I was making connections between things more readily - the slow processing that happens when you give an idea the time to develop before interrupting it with new input.

I was enjoying things more completely because I was not half-documenting them while experiencing them. On day fourteen I wrote more clearly for three hours than I had in the previous month.

I went back online at day twenty-one with a set of agreements I made with myself about how I was going to use the internet rather than letting it use me. Not all of those agreements have held perfectly. The attention I found offline has not been perfectly maintained online.

But I know what it feels like now and I can notice when it is gone, which means I can take steps to recover it. That reference point is the most valuable thing the three weeks gave me.