all or nothing

oh my god i feel better today. Let it be said, i know i’ve said this before, boring, repetitive: i like vacations. i really don’t like stay-cations. I just get nothing done and then feel bad about it. If i’m in a hotel and doing nothing, i’m fine with it. if i’m at home and doing nothing i just self-flaggilate the entire fucking time.

woke up today, september 1st, sigh, that’s better. can turn off my vacation message, can happily empty my inbox. can invite more people to join team 100.

and Mr. B says next year we should just go away for the entire month of august (like to Australia) and be really really unplugged.

Here’s what i learned in my one month of enforced, limited, online time.

moderation is hard (no shit!). it seemed like i would just get going on responding to emails or reading blogs and then the timer would go off, and i’d have to stop. i apparently suck at forced stopping when i’m ‘not done yet’.

i was always watching the clock to see if it was my online time yet (i.e. is it 6 pm when i could log in for an hour). If it was 5 pm, i wouldn’t start anything, i’d be waiting for it to be 6 pm. i wouldn’t go out. i’d just putter around and what. ridiculous. but that’s is how my brain works.

then when i was really officially offline, and i was reading, or listening to podcasts, or sleeping, or distracting myself, i was waiting for the online time to begin again.

this may mean two things: i’m happier when i’m productive and feel like i’m ‘caught up’ and that i’m a girl who likes structure and expectations. BUT ALSO it probably means that ‘limited’ online time for me is harder than just taking a 100% break. so i’m going to experiment with that too this coming weekend where i’ll try actually being 100% off. My guess is it’ll be easier.

My god i’m slow to learn this stuff.

Here’s what I know about me. I really am a bit ‘all or nothing’ … (i know this comes as no shock, as most over-drinkers i’ve talked to are very similar). So for vacations, i really should strive for ‘nothing’ in the ‘all or nothing continuum’. And then, this presumes that when i’m working, i’ll give it my full attention. This trying to do both at the same time thing just didn’t really work. I felt agitated by times the whole month. i had good moments, then crappy moments, the weather was crappy, but mostly I felt like i was wasting time … whatever that means.

i do email a lot of sober people. and i know that wolfie doesn’t take vacations. i just might find it easier, in how i take care of me, to go away entirely versus trying to ‘moderate’ my online time. like, is it a vacation if you take your laptop to the beach and check emails but just one hour a day? just in case?

up until today I would have said, yes, that’s best, check an hour a day, in case something is really happening.

but is this FOMO (fear of missing out), or is it a misplaced sense of importance, or is it a real inability to relax.

it’s probably all of those things.

not to self: moderation isn’t for you. For you, Belle, the thing is either on or off, at least as far as vacations are concerned. You’re either working or you’re not. You don’t mess with this 15% online thing. from now on you take 100% time off.

Starting this coming weekend when we go to the beach. no laptops at the beach. no cell phone. no connectivity. nothing.

gulp.