May 7: Screen-Free Week = Grouchy Jen

Screen-Free Week is over. Hooray! I stuck with it, with the tiniest bit of violations, for the entire seven days. I’m not gonna lie; it was not fun. The only time I remember feeling this kind of constant anger and resentment is when we did Atkins after I had Jack.

I kept a SFW journal all week so you could follow my descent into madness.

I have to remind y’all here that the PTO encouraged kids to participate in National Screen-Free Week and I felt that, as PTO prez, I needed to do it too. Vic agreed to do it with me, but he formed his own set of SFW rules. Jack and Katie went along with it too, unless you think escaping to their friends’ houses to play video games and watch TV was against the rules. (It totally was.)

(Just gotta point out the illegibility of my handwriting, which is a good clue of how seldom I take a pen to paper. What a mess.)

During SFW, I continued to email and text—this was the only way I was able to stay connected with the outside world. Some might say that wasn’t following the SFW rules, and to those people I extend a sincere invitation to bite my giant white butt. While Facebook is a definite time-suck for me, I realized during SFW that I depend on FB to stay in touch with friends and family. Cutting it from my screen time completely is too extreme, but I could probably spend a little less time on FB every day…

Victor suggested the similarity to Adventism, and how true it was! The many ways people interpret the rules makes SFW a different experience for everyone. Honestly, I didn’t miss my TV shows as much as I expected to, so maybe my own, super-logical (of course) set of rules for SFW would do just fine in the future. Sadly, we will never know, because THIS SFW RELIGION IS NOT FOR JEN.

I’ve gotten used to immediate notifications for texts and emails, and whether they contain important info or not, I did not like giving them up. Full disclosure: on Saturday I peeked at Facebook and played a few games of Sudoku on my phone. My hold on my sanity had become flimsy; I needed to do something.

I read a lot of reactions to SFW online today, and the people who had positive results said they had shared lots more family time than usual, got out the door faster in the mornings, were more productive, etc. The one good difference for me was that I read a LOT during the spare time I might have normally spent playing mindless games on my phone. All I really need to be enticed to read more is a good book, though, so I can’t credit SFW all on its own for all my extra reading.

In summary, I will probably not do Screen-Free Week again, at least not with the rules I set for myself this time. If I start pushing SFW next year at this time, please remind me how miserable I was last week.

Frustrating: the 357 unread items in Google Reader. That will take FOREVER to get through. I think I’ll do little bits at a time. Now, leave me alone so I can catch up on my 12+ hours of Hulu. Shhhhh…