I apologize for the lack of posting while I was at BEA but I couldn’t get it together enough to get stuff done — especially with the power going out at my apartment! BLAH.

I’ll be back with a Top Ten Tuesday tomorrow. But if you are really interested in my time at BEA I will be doing a recap (sooo long but with pictures YAY!) on Wednesday and then Thursday I will probably talk about the books I got and what I’m the MOST excited about.

But here’s a preview!!

This pic just embodies the trip — silly times with my blogging friends! This whole blogging thing might have been the thing that has brought us together but these friendships are for real! We were trying to spell book but I decided I couldn’t make a “B” so I just did something dumb. Photo credit to the amazing Rachel who you should use for all things photo related if you are in New York!

 And a sneak peek of just one of the books I got that I already am almost done with!!!

Well well well I survived. If you didn’t catch my original post about my experiment of doing a week long social media diet check that out!

So, I gave myself an hour per day to divvy up however I chose from Monday through Friday. I didn’t include the weekend because a) I’m generally too busy on the weekends for my social media usage to be a HUGE problem and b) it’s the weekend before BEA (if you are going check out this post in which I’ve made a handy guide so you can recognize me!) and I need to coordinate and what not.

Did I stick to my plan? Why yes, yes  I did.  I kept track down to the minutes and every time I refreshed twitter it was an automatic 15 seconds and yes I did keep track of them all. So I’m proud of myself for sticking to the time limit and not going over. However, I had all these great plans listed of ALL OF THE THINGS I would get done. But all these great plans got derailed. Let’s just say that Monday afternoon a wrench got thrown into everything when an auto-payment mix-up (and NO notification whatsoever because we are on paperless billing) got our POWER shut off. We called and paid immediately once we realized what the mix-up was but the power didn’t come back on until Wednesday at 5pm. So all that productivity?? DOWN THE DRAIN.

Here was my list of things I wanted to accomplish:

get blog posts written for when I’ll be in BEA and maybe get further ahead (HAHAH nope thanks to the power)
- do all the annoying behind the scenes things I hate doing (review archive updating, putting reviews on Goodreads, formatting old posts I still haven’t fixed from when I moved to WordPress in March 2012).  That was one of my bookish resolutions for this year so I need to get crackin’ on that! (again NOPE thanks to no power)
- clean the home (YES. I did when we had the sun shining into the apartment)
- indulge in some of my other hobbies (I was too stressed to do that and figure out what hobbies I wanted to indulge in lol)
- get ready for BEA!! (YES! I went shopping  and pulled clothes from my closet!)
-  comment on blog posts!! (Again, EFF YOU no power!)
- Work on my super secret project that I referenced here. (NOPE. Too stressed to think about it)
- READ READ READ (that’s what always gets the short end of the stick because of my Twitter addiction…which is ironic because the only reason I’m on Twitter is because of my BOOK BLOG) (YES!! I got reading done at the park because it was beautiful and LET THERE BE  GOOD LIGHT!)

My Observations:

1) It was SUPER lonely. I’m so used to be able to have pleasant conversation throughout the day and it’s nice! And when I did come on I knew it wasn’t going to be for very long so it was hard to engage in good conversation.
2)  Making myself keep track of every little refresh or mindless scrolling made me realize how often I do it and it’s so natural to just open my phone, click on Twitter and refresh — in between things I’m doing or while I’m in the car or whatever.
3. My fear of people forgetting about me was so hard to shake. I know people knew that I was going on this week long diet but I still felt like  nobody was really chatting when I came on.  I was probably being paranoid. I was also so paranoid that I missed things!
4. I had no idea what anyone else was up to throughout the week — blogwise or lifewise — and I didn’t like that.
5.  It was hard because the power was off and we didn’t really have much to do so I FELT my absence so much much as opposed to when I’m scarce on the weeks because I’m busy. Doing other things = no time to think about social media or care.
6. I rely on Twitter a lot for the news: I seriously, because we had no power, didn’t really know about the terrible tornado in Oklahoma because I wasn’t scrolling through my feed  much knowing that I’d get sucked in. I’d pop in and out so I never really saw anything. Kinda felt like an ass about all my tweets complaining about no power.
7. I can’t comment on my level of productivity because of not having my normal schedule due to the power outage but of the blog posts I did get done at Starbucks/Panera I felt like I did them faster and with less distraction. I did get more reading done without refreshing Twitter in between chapters haha.
8. It is SUCH a habit that I had to STOP myself so often from looking at Twitter. I always check any time I’m near my phone. It’s crazy.

My Takeaways

1. It really helped to become more self aware of my refreshing habit on my phone — like really have to look at it and be AWARE of when I was doing it — so I’m going to continue to work on that habit by trying to put the phone further away from me and just not keeping Tweetdeck open all the time on my computer. It seemed so silly all the time I wasted refreshing constantly. Making me aware of it really helped me NOT want to do that.

2. Besides the constant refreshing my other biggest problem was that I wasted SO MUCH TIME refreshing and scrolling and NEVER SAYING ANYTHING  for like an hour. I realized that I so craved the great conversations and when I’m just scrolling I’m not using Twitter productively or in the way that benefits me because I seriously MISSED the great conversations and saved a lot of my hour per day on making sure I could be on for a chunk of time rather than wasting that time on refreshing, scrolling and not interacting.  MORAL OF THE STORY: quality time vs. quantity of time I’m spending on Twitter.

3.  I liked being more present in what I was doing and hope to continue to keep that in mind. Because I wasn’t constantly refreshing and checking mentions I found myself more involved in the book I was reading outside or sitting in the car with Will and actually listening to him with my full attention. I also found that I fell asleep easier and didn’t sit in bed on my phone for 30 minutes later than I wanted to go to bed. That also could have been me trying to conserve my phone battery because of the lack of power.

4. I plan to continue to try to document my productivity level so that i can see how it compares on days I’m really spending lots of time on Twitter. I think that will be eye opening to me to see it on paper. I already KNOW I’m less productive with my bad Twitter habits but sometimes it doesn’t make me change until I SEE how bad it is on paper with numbers to it.

Overall it was a good experiment though circumstances beyond my control made it a lot different than I thought. It was eye opening and confirmed a lot of the things I thought and I definitely want to work towards better habits. I have to say though I made up for it already today because of my withdrawal from only going on 1 hr/day.