So about two weeks ago, I decided to go offline to finish revisions on my current book. I was about a week out from deadline, so I needed to clear my head and focus. And, while I did not stay offline completely, I did manage about a 95% reduction in my Facebook usage and a near total reduction in my twitter usage until I turned in my book.

Not complete but significant. Guess I’d make a terrible recovering addict. Anyway, some weird things happened while I was offline. Some are still continuing.

The first thing was that I lost out on any interesting articles and news stories. Twitter, for me anyway, isn’t just about going to a massive cocktail party and making conversation. It’s also a way for me to get news and read neat stuff that I wouldn’t necessarily see in the mainstream news sites. So I missed out on a lot of articles.

But, in that time I normally spent reading articles, I read two books. The Science of Evil and With Liberty And Justice for Some, both of which I’ll blog about later this week, as I’m determined to get back into regular blogging. But I digress. I read both books last week and it was really neat to not have the urge to go online and check twitter but instead to read books (one physical and one digital). Sadly, there was no noticeable change in how I’m doing most of my reading these days (on my iPad) but I’m still buying both the physical book and the digital book versions. Again, another post.

The other piece I missed out on was interacting with friends online. If there were any big announcements last week, I missed them. I missed out on the march madness for books, DABWAHA.

What’s really odd for me, though, is that it’s been over a week since I turned my book in and I’m still not having the intense urges to get back online. The social networking sites are there but they’re not constantly *there*. I’m not checking them out to see what’s changed. So it’s a strange thing that happened. The noise in my head settled somewhat and I was able to concentrate. Maybe my thoughts weren’t going a thousand miles an hour because I wasn’t constantly adding new information to my brain.

Either way, it was a neat experiment. I think I may have come out better for it.

Have you quit social networking before? How did that work out for you?