If you’re looking through a security camera at me during a regular workday, there’s not really that much happening. I think that internet use is a natural reaction to living a life which is pretty much the same every single day.

I was very lucky to be unemployed with my wife for three weeks between jobs. Our unemployment breaks came about from job offers at companies that graciously allowed us later start dates. I think it’s important to note that it’s a different flavor of unemployment when you know when your next job is starting, than when you’re unemployed indefinitely. It means you can be a bit more profligate with your money since you know that the next paycheck will come in soon. Also, I think that there’s a psychological aspect — you don’t feel the unemployment depression.

During my years of employment, I had accumulated a lot of fun things to do in New York that I’d never had time or energy to do. I did complete a few items off the list, but you just can’t get through that many when you’re working — there’s simply not enough energy or time. When employed, the weekends are a time of recovery, so you can go back to work the rest of the week. The time technically exists, but using it for fun means sacrificing maintenance elsewhere and your life falls apart a bit.

I also wanted to try a screen-free period. My plan was to have my wife take over my phone and computer, and I would get to pretend that technology doesn’t exist.

Overall, my three weeks of screen-free time were extremely pleasant. I only had some sort of minor withdrawal symptoms for the first six hours — I had this phantom phone feeling where I kept wanting to check my phone and then seeing that it was no longer in my pocket. 

Of course, this plan was inconvenient. I began by having my wife check & respond to all my messages for me, which turned out to be very onerous. I had to adjust to modern realities by batching all the messages and responses into like a 20-minute session at the end of the day. I’d still, however, characterize my time as still substantively screen-free. I was pretty good about keeping myself on task during the message answering sessions.

 I purchased myself a dumb phone for the screen free period, but I ended up needing to carry the smartphone around regardless. If, for example, I was meeting up with someone, it was difficult to tell people what my new number was and explain the whole situation about being screen-free. It was simpler to just carry the smartphone and turn it on only when I was actually at the meeting spot.

I wish I could say that I gained some superpowers, but overall, I just felt like I had more time & energy. My days didn’t slip by like they used to. I didn’t get sucked into screen time. I got a hell of a lot more reading done. I was reading just about one book every three days — the reading replaced my screen time. 

It also became clear to me — with no small amount of surprise — how many hours I spend googling random things out of curiosity. So, I started writing down my questions and then batching them for the end of my screen-free time. I think that helped me stay more connected to the real world rather than getting sucked into Wikipedia rabbit holes. The optimal amount of rabbit-holing is definitely non zero, but I think I was on the far side of the healthy amount.

I’d like to shift my life away from excessive Internet consumption. Being away from screens was lovely. The downside is that I would miss out on lovely blogs like Patio11’s Bits About Money and Works in Progress magazine. It’s easy enough to say that I should stop browsing the Internet outside of proven good content, but then that breaks the discovery mechanism. I’d want to do more exploit than explore, but exploring is essential. Yet, the exploration I do is mostly a waste of time — what the hell do I do?

I ended up doing a lot of things during my unemployment. I’ll include a list below.

• Wild food foraging in Central Park
• Hiking trail repair
• Many museums
• Hiking
• Archery
• Fishing
• Horseback riding
• Tour of Rockefeller Center
• Pistol shooting
• Beach day
• Walk from the tip of Manhattan to the bottom
• Sailing
• Picnic in Central Park

I actually got the compliment multiple times that I was the person best at being unemployed that they had ever met.

I spent a little bit of time before my unemployment planning in detail exactly how I was going to use every single day without overplanning it. Below is an image of my plan ahead of time.

I’m not too much of a fan of overplanning. So, in addition to this, I had a very long list of potential filler activities for the empty days. Then, as we woke up, depending on our mood, we could choose what activity we wanted to do that day.