So what should I do now? So far I’m playing with two ideas:
- no email after 10 p.m. Email remains the biggest part of my life where I lack balance, and I still need to get it more under control.
- read 50 pages a day. This is one that my wife has been doing, and she’s been enjoying it.

Other possibilities include:
- 30 days as a vegatarian.
- read the Bible (or the Qur’an) in 30 days. I’ve never read either all the way through.
- 30 days of trying to learn to play guitar.
- meditate 10-15 minutes a day for 30 days.
- try one new thing a day for 30 days.
- draw something everyday for 30 days.
- try polyphasic sleep for 30 days.
- go 30 days spending as little money as possible.
- learn as much of a new language as possible in 30 days.
- 30 days to get my finances in order (I haven’t really paid attention to financial stuff as much as I should).
- try to write a novel/book in 30 days.
- write down one thing I’m thankful for each day for 30 days.

Okay, those are a few that I’ve come up with. Tell me your suggestions and then I might put up a poll to let people vote.

I’ll embed the first video in the new series below (it’s about how PageRank flows from Twitter and Facebook in our web search rankings):

But usually I won’t blog about each new video. Instead make sure you follow @googlewmc . That way you’ll always find out first when new webmaster videos come out.

That’s right, I’m going Twitter-free for a week. I don’t really use Facebook, so that’s not a problem. The only other social networking website I use is FriendFeed, so I’m cutting that out too. To keep me on track this week, here’s what I did:

• Tweeted that I was doing the digital cleanse and changed my Bio line to mention that I was doing the digital cleanse.
• Removed all Twitter apps from my mobile phone.
• Removed the Twitter and FriendFeed shortcuts from Chrome’s new tab page.
• Hard-coded a bunch of websites so that I can’t even access them. In Linux, you can type “sudo vi /etc/hosts” and add the following lines:
  
127.0.0.1 twitter.com
127.0.0.1 www.twitter.com
127.0.0.1 facebook.com
127.0.0.1 www.facebook.com
127.0.0.1 friendfeed.com
127.0.0.1 www.friendfeed.com


  What these lines say is “Computer, when you try to use the domain name system (DNS) to resolve twitter.com to an IP address, hard-code the IP address to be 127.0.0.1.” Note that 127.0.0.1 is a special IP address that corresponds to your own computer. In essence, these entries make it impossible to browse to Twitter, Facebook, or FriendFeed. You might need to reboot your computer too for the settings to take effect.

I’m thinking that I might blog a little more now that I’ve stopped tweeting for a week, so I’m doing one extra step–I’m linking my blog in Feedburner so that when I publish a blog post, it will tweet a link to that blog post. Here’s how to do it:
1. Log in to http://feedburner.google.com/ and click on your blog’s feed.
2. Click on the “Publicize” tab and then the “Socialize” service on the left.
3. Add your Twitter account and select the options you want. Here’s how it looks:

Then click “Save” and that’s all you need to do.

So far, I’ve been Twitter-free for twelve hours. In that time, I’ve
- worked out
- taken down our Christmas tree, chopped it into sections and put it out on the street
- typed in three months’ worth of data for a project that I’m working on
- taken down our Christmas lights and packed them away
- stored all our various Christmas decorations
- run a couple loads of laundry
- put out the trash
- gone shopping and had a couple meals with my wife
Oh, and written a blog post. We’ll see how the digital cleanse works for the rest of the week.