Refocusing

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This morning I began the process of refocusing my life.  More specifically, I'm working on changing how I use the internet.  One reason I'm doing this is that I've been finding myself spending hours and hours wading through things that are meaningless to me.  That is, I end up reading blog posts and facebook posts that don't enrich my life.  I don't expect any hurt feelings over this as I'm sure there are those out there who feel the same about mine.  Another reason is that I have some life decisions to make that will probably greatly curtail my leisure time.  On Monday I'm beginning my last graduate school class.  At the end of the eight week class, my plans are to be employed in the nonprofit field.  I'm excited about some of the possibilities that are already in the works but I know there will be some major adjustments to make.  Thus, I need to make sure that the leisure time that remains is maximized.

My first task is to reduce the number of blogs I read to fewer than 50.  I tried to get it down to 25 but there are just so many good ones out there.  And by good, I mean ones that enrich my life where I'm at right now on a regular basis.  The rest of the blogs will go into a category titled something like "Blogs to read when I have spare time."  And I can revisit them from time-to-time and consider whether or not they need to be let back into my life.  By the same token, the ones that I will read regularly will need to be evaluated occasionally to ensure they still fit into my life.

Next I'm going to tackle facebook.  I have lots of friends and acquaintances on facebook but really only a few with whom I converse with on a regular basis or whose comments and observations I enjoy and/or learn from.  With most others, I find their posts to just overwhelm me and sometimes even keep me from seeing the posts that I really want to see.  Another problem I have is that, with people who have views that are radically different than mine, I find myself getting angry or negative - something I want to eliminate in my life.  I have a family member who is active in one political party and finally had to hide active members of the other party because of this very problem.  And I see her point.  It's not that other views are bad or even wrong, it's just that when they are obnoxious or what I believe to be closed minded that I have a problem.

Life is too short to too have your leisure time make you crazy!