Defragment Your Brain With A Digital Cleanse - Can You?

Tonight, Mayer has announced a One Week Digital Cleanse. The purpose? To ring in the new year with a slightly less chaotic mental state. In his post announcing the Cleanse, Mayer likens our increasingly scattered lifestyles to fragmented hard drives. It's an apt comparison ? between sites like Twitter, Facebook, and multiple Email boxes, most of us have data and friendships scattered across a dozen different places. Mayer thinks giving some of these up for a while might be a good way to "defragment" our minds. He's not quitting these services the way Trent Reznor and Miley Cyrus did, he's just taking a week long break, and he wants his fans to join him.

Unlike some similar campaigns I've heard of, which asked you to quit just about everything with a digital display, Mayer's drive is probably doable for a lot of people. It doesn't ask you to give up Email, and you can still use your cell phone for some things. Here are the guidelines :

Begins on January 1 at 9AM and runs until January 8 at 9AM *email only from laptop or desktop computers *cell phones can only be used to make calls, and no text messages or e-mails are allowed ¿ if you receive a text, you must reply in voice over the phone. E-mails must be returned from a laptop or desktop computer. *no use of Twitter or any other social networking site ¿ this includes reading as well as posting. *no visiting of any entertainment or gossip sites. (No need to detail which ones ¿ you know what they are.)

Work commitments keep me from engaging in the Cleanse myself, but you may want to give it a try, if only for a day or two. If nothing else, consider just how attached you've become to these online services. Last June, when I took a weeklong vacation to the Caribbean, I found myself suffering some pretty serious withdrawals when I couldn't compulsively check my Email or the latest tech news. It took about two full days of perfect weather and endless beaches to kick the sense of impending doom. That's a little weird. Technology is amazing, but getting some perspective is a good thing.

via washingtonpost.com

Posted via web from Liss's posterous