Love in Dark Settings

WEEK OF JULY 12
--Days online: 6.
--Hours online: 14.

WEEK OF JULY 19
--Days online: 6.
--Hours online: 16.

WEEK OF JULY 26
--Days online: 1.
--Hours online: 8.

WEEK OF AUGUST 2
--Days online: 1.
--Hours online: 6.

WEEK OF AUGUST 9
--Days online: 1.
--Hours online: 5.5.

WEEK OF AUGUST 16
--Days online: 1.
--Hours online: 3.

It's official. I'm in remission from my Internet addiction.

(*Bells ringing.* *Fireworks exploding.* *Twenty-one gun salute.*)

I still have one more major challenge ahead of me: this winter will be difficult, since I plan to go online less and will have fewer offline activities with which to distract myself (since I'll be homebound and won't be able to read standard-sized print, the way I can in the summer). But in celebration of what I've accomplished so far, here is a roughly chronological list of the steps that I took in my battle against my Internet addiction.

Success took me twelve years.

Limit the number of online forums I participate in.

Do not participate in online forums at all, except for vitally important reasons.

My Internet addiction began early in 1997, when I made the fatal decision to publish a magazine - eventually an e-zine - that required me to do heavy online research. Up until that time, I'd rarely visited the Internet. (My father had given me a computer with a modem in 1995; a year passed before I even touched it.) It took me about a year after I started my magazine to realize that my Internet usage had become excessive and uncontrollable. When I realized this, the first step I tried to take was to limit the amount of time I spent on the e-mail lists I was participating in at the time. It didn't work. It wasn't until this year that I finally admitted that my addiction was so bad was that the only solution was to stop participating in online forums altogether. I still post at online forums to announce my stories, or to obtain very specific pieces of information (usually for professional reasons). But I no longer participate in online forums (boards, comms, lists) just for the fun of it. They're too big a temptation area for me.

Take periodic long vacations from the Internet.

This was the next step I took, back in either 1998 or 1999: I gave up the Internet for Lent. It didn't do much good back then, because it was a once-a-year effort. I'm hoping that it will do more good this winter, when I go online just once a month.

Identify the triggers for my Internet addiction.

Boy, was I slow in successfully implemeting this one, even though I started trying to do this the moment I realized that I had an "addiction." (By that time, I'd been covering sexually compulsive behavior as a reporter for a couple of years; that gave me some idea of where a successful solution lay for my own nonsexual compulsive behavior.) But once this part of my battle really got rolling - this summer - it was like a steamroller, flattening everything in its path.

Identify the offline triggers for my Internet addiction.

This was one of the first problems I recognized, thanks to what I knew about sex addictions: I was going online too much because - at that time in my life - I was very unhappy with my offline life and was seeking a way to escape. Ultimately, this problem resolved itself on its own: the factors that had been making me so miserable disappeared from my life. But that didn't happen until the middle of this decade. Then I had to find a way to deal with my other big offline trigger: boredom.

Drop commitments that require me to be online frequently.

This was a lesson I had to learn over and over. My first attempt to follow this rule was in 2000, when I resigned as moderator of a flame-prone online forum that I was monitoring during my entire waking hours. I'm still officially moderator of two comms and three e-mail lists, but my moderation of these forums consists of nothing more than a passing glance on rare occasions. (That makes me a lousy moderator, of course.) More importantly, since early 2007, when I resigned as director of the EAA, I've refused to take on new commitments that would require my frequent online presence.

Become partially sighted.

Okay, I can't recommend this method for everyone. But my severe dry eye was almost certainly caused partly by my Internet overuse. (I was tearing up tremendously while on the Internet for fourteen hours a day in 2000, but nobody told me that this was a honking big danger signal.) Therefore, when I lost much of my sight in 2001 - and it looked as though I would lose all of it - I realized that I had to get serious about finding a solution to my Internet problem.

Think about simplicity.

I started doing this in 2001, as a result of being forced to live a very simple lifestyle until my eyes were good enough again that I could do some of the activities I could do before my eyes gave out. Such as going on the Internet, alas.

Figure out which types of Websites are most likely to trigger my Internet addiction.

I began doing this in 2002, when I started recognizing that certain types of Websites make me more click-happy than others.

Find a way to read e-mails offline.

Actually, I didn't need to develop this particular rule, because I was using Netscape's e-mail software from the very beginning as a method by which to read my e-mail. However, when I switched to a new e-mail service around 2002, I made a deliberate decision to find a service that would allow me to continue using Netscape's e-mail software, so that I could easily download and read my e-mail offline.

Keep myself from being instantly accessible for private discussions online.

I never got into the various forms of real-time messaging, thank goodness. That had less to do with self-control than to the fact that I hate not being able to rewrite what I write. But at some point, I did have to turn off the part of my software that would check my e-mail every few minutes and ring a bell if new messages had arrived.

Find advice and role models for living the simple life.

I'd still be hopelessly trapped in my Internet addiction if I hadn't taken this step. I started seeking simplicity advice and role models in the spring of 2003 and quickly stumbled across writings by and about monks, nuns, and hermits. Later I started reading lots of writings from people in the voluntary simplicity movement. Alas, I'm still seeking a large body of work on how to lead the simple life as a writer. In the absence of such advice, I've had to develop my own rules.

Give myself daily duties and rules.

The earliest record I have of a "Rule of Life" (the phrase comes from the common practice of monks, nuns, and hermits of putting together a set of rules they must abide by) is from 2003. It was a direct outgrowth of my reading about monks, nuns, and hermits. Needless to say, it would take another half decade before I actually made any progress in keeping my Rule of Life. I continue to refine my Rule of Life periodically.

Figure out what works and doesn't work, and make changes to my rules accordingly.

This was so obvious to me that I didn't list it in my first draft of this blog entry, but I suppose it might not be obvious to someone who's stuck on the idea of adhering to a particular set of rules forever.

Be aware of how my Internet usage is affected by my mental condition.

I don't know at what point I realized that my Internet addiction was an outgrowth of my mania. During my years as a manic-depressive, I'd never given my mania much thought; my depression was the far worse problem. When my Internet addiction began, I didn't even know that I still had mania, since my clinical depressions had disappeared in 1990. But once I realized that I was acting manic online, I realized that I needed to find ways to keep myself from getting trapped in the typical high-low-high bipolar pattern, because otherwise I'd end up going online to boost myself from feeling low. I also realized - what I hadn't realized till then - that I was regularly engaging in reckless behavior online: impulsively posting forum messages that I should have given much more thought to. So preventing reckless online behavior got pushed up in my priorities, which was why online forum posting began to look more and more problematic.

Limit the number of lists and blogs I read regularly.

I started doing this - very gradually - around the middle of this decade.

Find offline activities that scratch the same itch as online time does, but are more controllable.

Around 2005, I discovered that certain activities, such as Web layout, were so similar to online time - but less likely to get out of hand - that I could safely use them as a substitute for online time. However, this knowledge in itself wasn't enough until I developed other methods to protect myself.

Follow a daily schedule.

My first daily schedule was in 2006, and I'm amused to see that it's almost exactly the same schedule I've been trying to follow this summer: eat and read, dance, and work. I'd developed that schedule before 2006 in consultation with my Muse (it works very well for him) but hadn't tried to force myself to follow it when my Muse wasn't around.

Track my wordage.

In an indirect way, this helped me to assess how my Internet usage was affecting me. "Very badly," I soon realized. Starting in mid-2004, my links-chasing had caused my writing productivity to decline.

Track how much time I'm spending on other activities.

I started doing this in September 2006 and still do it, because it immediately became obvious that I had a serious productivity problem, mainly caused by the Internet. As a result, my computer timer is my most-used piece of software.

Go online no more than once a week.

I first tried the "go online for a short while each day" rule, but it just didn't work for me. I need a gap of time between visits to the Internet in order to detox. I set up the ideal of "no more than once a week" some time around 2006 or 2007; it took me till this month to figure out a way to achieve it.

Find fun activities to do offline.

Remember me identifying boredom as a trigger for going online? The lack of fun offline activities was a problem that I'd continue to work on till this month, when I realized why I was having difficulty identifying such activities. More on that toward the end of this entry.

Stop doing activities that cause me to have to gather links.

It's a sign of how badly addicted I was that it took me till 2007 to develop this rule. Editing The Slash Skinny was my last new links-gathering activity, while my coverage of Hurricane Gustav for True Tales in 2008 caused such a backslide in my Internet addiction recovery that I resolved to eliminate all older activities that were requiring me to search for links. I'm still working on that, but I'm nearing the bottom of the barrel now.

Acquire a research assistant who can go online for me.

I'm going to talk mainly about big changes after this, but my apprentice is the unnoticed cement that holds the big building blocks in place. Time after time, his willingness to look things up for me on the Internet has kept me offline. The presence in my life of a research assistant wasn't an accident (though meeting Noakes was) - I had been searching for a research assistant for a couple of years by the time I found him, in May 2007.

Serve as a role model.

Taking on an apprentice placed certain responsibilities on me. When I discovered that my apprentice was spending too much time online, I realized that I needed to have my behavior match my advice to him. (I'm happy to say that he has deliberately scaled back on his Internet hours since then.) Moreover, I couldn't spend all my time in an Internet haze, because I needed to be available to my apprentice.

Keep my main computer from being hooked to the Internet, and keep my Internet computer out of sight and not easily accessible when I'm not using it.

This rule developed purely by accident in September 2007, when my laptop started acting up, and I hastily moved my files to a back-up computer. My laptop still hasn't died, but since my back-up computer has no wireless connection, and I no longer have a landline Internet account, I can't go on the Internet when I'm working on this computer (the one I'm typing on right now). Absolutely splendid; that went a long way in helping me with my Internet addiction. Keeping my laptop unplugged in another room when I wasn't using it helped too.

Reward myself with colored stars when I get a certain amount of offline work done daily.

My mother introduced me to this practice, back when I was four years old. (I still have one of her starred calendar sheets from back then.) I was already getting a certain amount of delight in marking colored lines on paper showing the time I spent on my daily duties, so I decided to add the stars in October 2007.

Dedicate my life to simplicity.

I announced this in my Noah's Ark post in December 2007. I'd been seriously considering this decision for several years and had finally realized that I had reached the point with my Internet addiction (now more than ten years old) where I had no choice. Once I made this decision - undoubtedly the most important one on my long journey - a whole bunch of other decisions began tumbling forth.

Limit my contact with other people.

I didn't just dedicate my life to simplicity in December 2007; I dedicated my life to being a solitary from society for a goodly portion of the year. Most of my social life was online, so limiting my time online meant giving up most of my socializing. (See the bit above about online forums.) As for offline socializing, I realized that I had to limit that as well, because the very act of going out and mingling in social groups was keeping me from leading a simple life. It was also triggering my Internet addiction because I kept going online to search for offline social groups. So making new acquaintances had to be elimited as one of my goals in life (though of course I continue to be delighted when people introduce themselves to me). This sacrifice - and boy, was it a major sacrifice - was meant to decrease the amount of time I spent in casual schmoozing, but increase the amount of time I spent with my family, friends, correspondents, and readers.

Track my Internet time each day.

An obvious decision, but it didn't occur to me to do this until December 2007.

Decide my priorities in life.

Another decision from December 2007. It took me a while to figure out where my priorities lay, and longer to realize that I couldn't do everything fun that I'd like to do, because there weren't enough hours in the day. The more clear it became how little time I had in which to achieve my priorities, the less appealing online time seemed.

Download online materials for offline reading/viewing.

Download online materials for offline reading/viewing, but don't download new materials till I've looked at the ones already downloaded, and place limits on how much new material I download.

It took me a while to refine this rule. What I initially found was that I spent more time on the Internet when I downloaded materials to read or view offline, because I went links-clicking like crazy. So I had to put rules in place to prevent the downloading from getting out of hand.

Spend most of my time at home.

This was a natural outgrowth of my decision to limit my socializing, but it took me a while to figure out some of its benefits in non-social circumstances. For example, if I travel out of town, I often have to check the schedule of the place I'm visiting. How do I check the schedule? Why, by going on the Internet, of course.

Limit my library time.

Some time in this decade, I figured out that my Internet addiction was merely a recent manifestation of my lifelong addiction to text-browsing in general. As a child (and also as an adult), I had just as strong a problem with compulsive library browsing and book-borrowing as I later did with Internet browsing and downloading. The difference was that there's a limit to how many books I can carry home, and I'm too lazy to walk to the library each day. But my Internet addiction was going to continue until I tackled the related problem of my compulsive library usage. It's taken me till this summer to begin to cut back on the amount of time I spend in compulsively library browsing; I've had to develop alternative ways of obtaining print books (reading books from my own personal collection, and borrowing books through interlibrary loan, which Doug can pick up for me). Also, the fact that I'm limiting the amount of time I spend out of the house restricts how often I can go to the library.

Exercise regularly.

When I don't exercise, I get tired; when I get tired, I make bad decisions. I'm still working on following this rule.

Garden.

This keeps me at home, but allows me to exercise outside, which I need to do if I'm not to turn into a Pale Hermit In A Cave.

Don't go online when I'm tired.

A simple but important rule. I spend more time on useless online activities when I'm tired. I'm also more inclined to go online on impulse when I'm tired.

Get rid of the clutter in my life, and organize what's left.

I was initially worried by time clutter, so it took me a while to face up to the problem of the psychological effects of physical clutter in my life. That happened last summer, when I saw how physical clutter had diminished the quality of my mother's life. I'm my mother's child; my problem with physical clutter was nearly as bad, and got worse after I inherited her clutter. More importantly, thinking about what was essential in my physical life helped me to determine what was essential in my mental life. Online time was not at the top of the list.

Make a list of Web tasks when offline, and stick to the list when I go online.

I started keeping a Web tasks list in December 2008, but it took me a while to find ways to stick to the items on the list.

Identify the online triggers for my Internet addiction.

I'd been doing this all along, of course, but in the past year, I've gotten really serious about scrutinizing my Internet usage, especially by looking at the history file of sites I've visited.

Go online in a different room from where I do my regular work.

This was the result of another accident, when my wireless connection got screwed up, so that I had to plug my computer directly into the wireless mechanism in Doug's study. Turned out that it helped alleviate my addiction, because I no longer associated my study with going online.

Slow down.

I identified this several years ago as important to my overall mental health, with the side effect that I'm less likely to be frenetic online. But I'm still working on slowing down.

Minimize the number of tasks I do each day.

For me, multi-tasking means doing more than a handful of activities each day. Remember that schedule of "read and eat, dance, and work"? It only succeeds if I don't pile too many different activities into the "work" period. I've known how important this was since 2001, when I realized that severely limiting the number of activities I did daily was the key to leading a life of simplicity, but only this summer have I realized how much multi-tasking triggers my Internet addiction.

Find alternative ways to do necessary things, in order to minimize time online.

It's amazing how valuable this particular rule has proved to be. Time after time, I've told myself, "Oh, I can't stop doing that, because it's absolutely necessary for my professional work." Yet when I develop an alternative method, it invariably turns out to work as well as the previous method, or even better. So this is a rule I'd underline to fellow Internet addicts: Never tell yourself that there's no other way to do things. Go looking for that other way.

Explain to acquaintances what you're doing, so that they'll understand why you're taking the steps you are to control your Internet addiction and won't unintentionally lure you into activities you've designated as taboo.

And guess what? They'll probably rush to be your support group.

Next to my apprentice and my friends, my readers have been my biggest support system for fighting Internet addiction. I've lost track of how many of my readers have said, "I understand that you may not be able to do [insert online activity here], because you're trying to kick your Internet addiction." This knowledge that my readers understand and are willing to make allowances has given me the courage to find creative alternatives to my traditional online behavior. Moreover, the knowledge that others are out there cheering me on has helped me past some of the hard patches. I can't quail in the face of their hope that I'll make progress.

Centralize my online activities to a few places.

Though I realized a long time ago that I needed to limit the number of Websites I visited, it took me a while to extend this principle to limiting the number of Websites where I post or uploaded material. That's one reason I've been so feverishly refining my publishing process this summer: so that I can publish in fewer places. Moreover, I've centralized my posting activities by spending less time marketing in places other than my blog. My blog has also become the place where I do all of my online chatting (other than through e-mail). This required me to encourage my readers to do a bit of chatting back, but it was worth the effort. I don't feel the absence any more of online forums, because I know that, when I go online, people will have sent me e-mails and posted entries at my blog. I also know, that if I post at my blog, people will read what I say, so I don't need to go elsewhere. (You'll notice that I'm developing a theme here about how important my readers have been to me in this struggle. They certainly have.)

Find an easy way to cross-post to my mirrored blogs.

Thank you, thank you, Dreamwidth. You cut my blog-posting time in half.

Find an easy way to download blog entries.

Because of the LJ-cut, I hadn't been able to simply download my Friends pages and read my blog entries that way. Moreoever, I was struggling with the problem that LiveJournal's new access mechanism prevented me from simply doing a click-and-download on the LJ-cuts of any journals that were designated 14+ or adults-only. (When you do that, what you get is a copy of the warning page.) So I was stymied about how to get my blog entries quickly downloaded, till I discovered the mobile version of LJ/IJ/DW. I managed to set up the mobile version of my Friends page at Dreamwidth in such a way that I could easily download all of the new entries in journals and syndicated feeds that I read regularly. Of course, part of the deal was that I had to severely limit how many blogs I read.

Write stories that require minimal research.

Not surprisingly, it took me a while to accept this rule, even though I realized a few years ago that online research for my stories was exacerbating my addiction. Even library research required online time. I was in a dilemma: How could a historical fantasy writer not do research? Last winter, though, I discovered that I could minimize research time by choosing a subject (in this particular case, British schoolboys of the 1910s) in which most of my research consisted of reading period sources that were easily located at the big three e-text sites (Internet Archive, Google Books, and Project Gutenberg). By contrast, the research I've been doing this summer on the 1960s has taken a horrendous amount of Internet time; I'm never doing a project like that again. So basically, what I need to do is focus on writing projects whose main requirement is that I read lots of easily-accessible public domain texts (preferably fiction, since I'm less likely to skim that, so my reading time slows down).

Develop stronger relationships with people I can communicate with offline.

This includes, not only people I talk to in person and by phone, but also people I correspond with by e-mail, since I write my e-mails offline.

Read and write e-mails offline.

Mustn't forget that rule. It was a very important piece of the puzzle, since reading and writing e-mails online was taking a lot of time, and was also causing me to go links-chasing.

Go online on a specific day of the week or month.

We've worked our way up to late July 2009. By this point, I'd been laboring hard for over a decade to limit my online time, and I'd developed some really good rules for Internet usage, yet I was spending almost as much time online as I'd been in the early part of this decade. Not surprisingly, I was discouraged. Then I read a book about limiting television viewing, and that book suggested that one good rule was to watch TV only on the weekends. I decided to try to go online only on Saturdays. I really didn't think it would make much difference, since I'd had the "no more than once a week" rule forever, and had never managed to follow that rule. But surprisingly, picking a particular day of the week made all the difference. It meant that I wasn't thinking about going on the Internet the other six days of the week, because I knew that I wasn't allowed to go online on those particular days. By contrast, when the day of the week was left fuzzy, I was always thinking, "I can go online once a week. . . . Almost there. . . . Almost there. . . . Oh, heck, why not go online now? It's been at least four days since I was last online. That's nearly a week."

Download my e-mail on the day before I go on the Web.

I immediately had to refine the only-on-Saturdays rule to allow myself to pick up and answer offline any e-mail the day before, because it became apparent that I couldn't answer a week's worth of correspondence on the same day that I visited the Web. The knowledge, though, that I would go on the Web the next day kept me from surfing when I went briefly online to download my e-mail (so briefly that I don't count that as online time). This was an amazing achievement in itself.

Designate the following day for activities related to simplicity.

This was a rule I'd been experimenting with for several months, but it ended up becoming really valuable once I developed the above schedule, because it allowed me to develop a triad of e-mail, Web, and activities that remind me why I shouldn't be online all the time.

As my last activity on the Web each week, download my blog entries and any e-mail that has arrived since the previous day.

This gave me something fun to read offline and gave me incentive to go offline.

Limit my Web tasks.

Remember that Web tasks list? Turned out it wasn't much help unless I only had a few activities on it each week.

Limit the number of online activities I do that require Web searches.

I already knew how important this was, actually - Web searches are major trigger for my Internet addiction - but now that I was making progress, I got really serious about enforcing this rule.

I don't have to do everything I planned to do online. If I find I'm spending too much time online, I can do the rest of my work next week.

Pretty obvious, but it took me till now to figure this out. Also, the only way in which this will work is if I have very few professional deadlines. That's another reason I've been fiddling with my publishing procedure - to allow myself flexibility in timing.

Limit online marketing techniques, not to what works best, but to what causes the fewest Internet addiction problems. That means accepting the possibility of failure as a professional writer.

This rule tore at my heart. As a professional writer (and to a certain extent, as an amateur writer), you get the message drummed into you: "Do whatever marketing activities are likely to bring in more readers." In my case, as a self-publisher, there's been a very real possibility that, if I didn't select the most successful marketing techniques, I'd fail to find new readers and would fail to make money. (Writing is my only source of income.) But for twelve years, I've been using research and marketing as my primary excuses for going online. I finally had to tell myself, "Even if this means I'll never succeed professionally as a writer, I have to spend as little time marketing online as possible."

Publish in a few big chunks rather than in lots of dribbles.

This followed from the previous rule. Until now, I've serialized my novels in installments, for a lot of good reasons. But those reasons aren't good enough, considering how much Internet time serializations require of me.

Stop spending a lot of online time finding new marketing and publishing techniques.

This rule scares the heck out of me, but I suspect that I'm going to need to implement it, because my remaining problems with spending too much time downloading articles from links on my Web tasks list mainly has to do with the publishing news blogs that I'm following. I'm having to remind myself: "Never tell yourself that there's no other way to do things. Go looking for that other way." Somehow, I'll find an alternative way to keep track of the most important marketing and publishing news.

Limit the number of forums I read that have lots of links to articles I'll want to download.

The more progress I've made with cutting my online time, the more quickly I've identified remaining problems.

Take breaks every thirty minutes from the Internet.

I'd tried this earlier this summer, but had given it up when I got discouraged about my lack of progress in fighting my Internet addiction. But when I found that, even when going online only once a week, I was still losing control of myself when online, I decided to try the thirty-minute rule again. Bingo. Even a short break from the Internet gives me the opportunity to ask myself, "Do I really need to be spending this much time on this activity?" The answer is almost always, "Let's wrap this activity up and move on."

Develop enjoyment in offline activities.

Remember my earlier puzzlement over the fact that I couldn't think of any fun activities to do offline? This, the last piece in the puzzle, was actually one of the first rules I encountered, back when I first read the book Virtual Addiction many years ago. The trouble was that, until I reached the point where I was no longer in an Internet haze most of the time, I couldn't fully appreciate any of the many activities I'd once enjoyed (reading lots of printed books, for example) that had fallen to the wayside since 1997. Similarly, last winter I rediscovered the joys of spending extended time with my Muse, the way I did routinely in the years before I fell into the clutches of Internet addiction. As a result, the Internet is looking more and more like a jaded prostitute that can't be compared to one's true beloved. (Well, not all of the Internet, of course. Just the ultra-possessive Internet I've known till now.)

Don't give up.

If you're fighting an Internet addict, repeat this mantra to yourself daily. I wouldn't have made it to this point without follow that rule.