Me? I failed. But to be honest, it was an insane demand for me to go 24 hours. I did go the first half of the day without problems, but then I gave in and plugged my router back in. However, I hardly used the net for the rest of the day, and didn’t bother with instant messaging, any forums, or any non-urgent email.
So it was a partial success in those terms.
However, in productivity terms, it was pretty awesome. I got way more done in the first 3 hours of the day than I normally would. The fact that I had no email to answer,l share prices to check, sales to analyse, or forum discussions / twitter chat to think about kept my mind 100% focused on some particularly evil bugs and getting some new features into the mystery next game.
What is truly sad, is how when I did relent and checked news sites, forums, twitter etc…. I hadn’t really missed much. There had not been any major events that I was missing out on, I just got to read a few emails 6 hours later than usual. Given the pretty significant boost in my productivity, i think this shows there is something in this.
As some have noticed, my self-declared no-inetrnet day also took out amazon and the PS3 network. Such is my POWER.
I think what I may do is try to implement no-internet mornings on Monday-Friday, when I am at my most productive. This is certainly worth an experiment. On the downside, that means American customers emailing me while I’m asleep get their replies 6 hours later, but they are asleep till then anyway.
I’m at the ‘proper production’ stage in my next game, which is no longer code-named ‘LB’. It might be code named ‘GTB’, or ‘OTT’ or something else. I haven’t decided 100% yet. Proper production is when I’m putting final art assets into the game, and coding big chunks of it. It’s too late for major design changes, but releasing screenshots is still a long way off.