Unplugging

Prompted by Hugh MacLeod’s withdrawal from Twitter and Facebook, tempted by Brydon Gillis’s untethering, inspired by Dark Mountain and egged on by Miranda’s internet distraction log, I’ve decided to unplug my brain from the mainframe.

Little Fish seems to have become a band that doesn’t do music. We have occasional gigs and sporadic recording sessions, but for the most part we do email. I build web pages, re-encode videos, fix metadata, arrange meetings, research strategy, everything except getting in a room with some awesome musicians and making music. We’re going to fix that.

Hugh MacLeod summed it up in his last post:

Quit wasting time obsessing about pimping your ass and checking your stats. Instead, MAKE stuff. Make AMAZING stuff. Make stuff that is so good that people have no choice but to find out about it. Otherwise, you REALLY are just wasting your time. This game is already TOO hard and TOO BIG a time suck to fritter away on what is, for the most part, a big ol’ distraction.

We’ve made a great song with a brilliant video, but we need to make more. No amount of email will get that done, and social media doesn’t help much either.

So I’m going to ease off the internet over the next week or so. I’ll spend less time on Twitter, and leave my iPhone at home for a while. I’ll definitely quit Facebook – I’ve barely used it in a year anyway. I’ll cut my blog subscriptions down the bare minimum: friends’ blogs and a few Google alerts on Little Fish stuff. I’m going to rebuild my blog on Jekyll soon anyway, so I’ll add Disqus comments to that and put more of my energy into blogging.

Wish me luck. And if I’m not answering your tweets or pokes or check-ins, try reaching me by email or phone: 07812204396.