Being offline for an entire week has really put a lot of things into perspective. Coming back to a veritable information overload online with over 1,500 unread Google Reader items, I’ve decided that a lot of the noise I listen to runs completely counter to my goals in life. So I’ve decided to make a few drastic changes to my habits.

• I pared down my Google Reader subscriptions from 237 feeds to just 63. That might still sound like a lot, but the ones I’ve kept align well with my interests. Instead of multitudes of technology and gaming blogs, I’m keeping just a small handful of interesting gaming sites, alongside all of the writing, art, and politics blogs I followed previously.
• Twitter and FriendFeed have been removed from my default Firefox home tabs, and from my bookmarks. This one was tough. But I’ve mentioned several times in the past that Twitter is an enormous timesink, and FriendFeed wasn’t getting any better. FriendFeed works well as a lifestreaming service, but being involved in the community wasn’t doing me any favors. The Twitter community is one I would miss; there’s a lot of great local people there that I have been really connecting with recently. Ultimately, however, they simply aren’t necessary.
• Numerous bookmarks deleted. There’s quite a few social sites that I’ve had bookmarked that I never truly intend to visit again. Now, I don’t have to even think about it.
• Art is taking a backseat to writing. I still love art and drawing; and to a lesser extent, photography (I think I really only like my wife’s photography), but I have to shelve the idea that continues to sit in the back of my mind that I could potentially be some sort of artist and/or cartoonist. That isn’t the life I want. I predominantly love the written word, and that needs to be my focus more than anything else. This includes both fiction and blogging, my two most accessible creative outlets.

Since drafting my declaration of creativity back in April, I haven’t actually demanded all that much creativity out of myself. I don’t know how many declarations or demands I’ll have to make of myself before I actually begin to live that life, but hopefully not too many. Otherwise, I’ll just be making a mockery of my own desires, and I don’t think any of us really wants that.