What a Seattle blogger learned when he took a year off from the digital world

A Seattle blogger, who went Internet silent for a year, is coming back online with a fresh perspective.

David Roberts tells KIRO Radio’s Jason Rantz that in his job as an online journalist, he was constantly connected, following news, blogs and social media posts 24/7.

“I worked on the Internet. I wrote on the Internet. I was a journalist, so I followed the news cycle. I followed Twitter. I followed everybody’s blogs and Tumblers and Instagram, and God knows what else. What I found was I was spending hours and hours just kind of churning away trying to keep up with stuff.”

All told, Roberts estimates he was spending 10 to 12 hours a day in front of a screen.

“I would wake up, walk to my computer and be there until my kids got home. I’d feed them dinner, put them to bed, maybe watch some TV with my wife, and then be back on the computer until 1, 2 or 3 a.m.”

Spending so much time plugged in meant other parts of his life were suffering. Roberts says he’d gotten a little bigger around the midsection. His body felt creaky from lack of use, and his time with his family was often split with a screen.

“I just realized this one activity, which is bouncing around on the Internet, had kind of metastasized and eaten my life,” says Roberts.

So he made the decision to unplug. He didn’t give up all use of the Internet. He says he still used Google for directions and would buy things on Amazon. But the prolific tweeter, who once went over Twitter’s limit (back then 1,000 tweets in a day), decided to go totally silent online.

“I didn’t work. I cut off my work email. I stopped following news cycles. I turned off my RSS feeder and most of all, I just went quiet. I didn’t tweet. I didn’t Facebook. I didn’t email people,” says Roberts. “I just was only meatspace David Roberts and I totally stopped being Internet David Roberts.”

Roberts says the first few weeks was quite an adjustment.

“Anyone who has a smartphone knows that after a while, getting that phone out of your pocket becomes a completely unconscious automatic instinct, it just happens,” says Roberts. “I found myself many, many times in those early weeks with my phone in my hand staring at it and realizing there’s nothing on it. I had uninstalled all social media. I’d shutdown my email. So there was nothing coming in on it for me to see, but I would just sit there and stare at it for a few seconds.”

After so many years of a considerable amount of his time spent monitoring the web and media online, Roberts says he had to find all new ways to fill his time.

“I had been so immersed in the Internet for so long as part of my job that I had kind of let all my interests and hobbies sort of drift away, kind of mold, so when I suddenly cut off this huge, huge part of my day, I sort of had to figure out what does a person do when they’re not on a computer. How do I fill my days? It sounds simple but it’s not.”

Roberts discovered a lot of value in the extra time he suddenly had available, even those boring moments where, in the past, he would have pulled out his smartphone.

“Some of the best times you spend with your kids are some of these unstructured hours where you’re not really doing anything […] It’s those little spontaneous interactions where all the good stuff happens,” says Roberts. “If you fill up all those moments with devices, you never really experience that kind of time, and I missed that and I’ve enjoyed the heck out of having it back.”

The real lessons he took from the experience he says are things most of us all already understand, like the importance of exercise and a good work-life balance.

“Your mind needs a varied diet, just like your body does,” says Roberts. “When you’re on your deathbed and you’re looking back, you’re going to wish you spent more time with people, and more time doing purposeful things with people, and not that you worked more.”

He says it’s not the knowing of the trick or habits for a better life, but the actual doing of it that makes a difference. And as he steps back into the online world, he’s being very deliberate in his choices so he doesn’t lose sight of a balanced life again.

“I’m going to try to schedule time where I’m on Twitter and doing email and bouncing around the Internet. I’m going to schedule times when I take breaks and take a walk or just go out and go sit for a while and meditate,” says Roberts. “These things don’t happen naturally, so you have to force them. You have to force yourself to take breaks. You really have to schedule times these days not to be online, otherwise that world will just suck you in.”

Roberts has an article detailing his offline experience in Outside Magazine this month.