What is AFK?

AFK is an acronym for “away from keyboard“. It is commonly used to let others know that you will be unavailable for a short time. In some other words, it means going offline.

I thought of making AFK from social media for short time. To be exact its for a week between April 7th 9AM – April 14th 9AM 2017.

I posted my plan in Twitter and WhatsApp to let my friends know that I will not available online for a particular amount of time; before 3 minutes of the start of offline time.

Why I have posted in last minute?

Because I decided to go offline by 8.55 AM 7th April only. It sounds crazy, doesn’t it?

Okay, do I have any Disclaimer in this game? Yes I do

Yes, some automated messages may be posted on my Facebook & Twitter timeline whenever I post a new blog post in my blog.

What is the reaction of my friends?

I have received a various reaction from friends. Some reactions  are

• Enjoy the break, taking break is fun
• Why are you doing this?
• I tried this earlier for short time like a day
• And somebody like, Is this really that much difficult to you?
• And rest is like Who cares what you do? LOL

Am I going to reinvent the wheel in this break? Of course, Not!! I wanted to experiment and do this, so I tried this. I like to experiment new things always. This is one among.

What’s the rule?

• Stay offline in Social Media during the mentioned time
• Should not open Social Media in Web / Apps / anyway
• Should not communicate friends via any messenger which uses the Internet

Did I break the rule?

Yes, I do break the rule in the very first day evening to send a thanks note to one of my co-worker in their Farewell.

That’s the first and last.

So what happens to my social media Apps in that time?

I planned to track the number of notifications I’m receiving overall. And the following is the number of notifications I received till in the very First day afternoon.

I just grouped some of Apps under the Folder named Social. Its quiet good number 🙂

Day by Day the number increases slowly, I wish not to read text messages and secondary mails to my personal as well in this break. And I have added some more apps to the Social Folder to track the number of notifications.

In the final Day of break how many notifications I have received in the past week? Here it is

Can you see the Folder with name Social which is blinking with a three digit number? (Additional Info: That pretty image in my wallpaper is clicked by me)

Yup, 951 notifications only. Let’s see the detailed view of Social Folder as well.

And again some may think this is very less number only. Ah! folks, this is not number counting game. This number is showed to describe how much time we are spending with Apps.

Let’s make a small calculation. How much time will take to check each and every notification?

Let’s say I would spend 10 seconds to 1 notification on average. On another note, I’m a slow reader so I would take more than 10 seconds.

951 * 10 seconds = 9510 seconds

In other words,

158.5 minutes

~ 2.641667 hours

When we see some notification, we will be interested to reply those messages or tweets. And the time I used to spend in NewsFeed or Timeline is not mentioned here.

Did I save this 2.6 hours of my life? I don’t have an answer for this question.

What I did in this social media break time?

I didn’t do anything new in my life.

• I made bicycle ride
• I went morning walk
• I wrote blog post
• I read books
• I wrote code in my personal project

I just did my regular tasks but without posting them online or discussing with friends in online.

Usually I won’t call my friends in mobile. I usually send messages to them If I wish to contact them. But In this one week time I tried to call two of my friends using my cell phone. Yes I tried! The number was busy. 🙂

Mostly I won’t have, any audio songs or video songs on my mobile device (If needed I will hear in online). I used to keep podcast and audio books in my mobile storage. I always used to watch music videos on my laptop. So I thought I have some free time and I have prepared some playlist in my mobile device & loaded some songs.

Did I miss anything important in this time?

I think I’m not. I had the bad habit to respond to all messages which I think important. And I used to motivate my friends always whenever they are attempting to something. I can’t do that in this week break. Other than that everything is fine.

Taking a break is fun. So just experiment when getting some time.

Just inform your friends before doing this game, because sometime they will decide that you’ve left the earth to do some space research.

 

Enjoy the life 🙂