Well I lasted one whole day without using Twitter or blogging. And I came to the realisation that my personal and business lives are so completely intertwined with each other and with technology that is not feasible to disconnect from them and still work. The only way to truly disconnect is to go on a holiday.

Yesterday while disconnected from Twitter I missed out on hearing a friend’s good news (he’s off to a glam geek job in San Fransisco – tweet him with any good drinking holes there). And from reading the logs there was a lot of relevant business discussions I missed out on as well. Not to mention not live tweeting Interesting South last night.

The other realisation is that, much Pepys, I do like to keep a diary and this blog is it. Also I discovered that I think much better without a pen in my hand. The words flow more readily from my keyboard onto a screen than in longhand onto a page.

Another discovery is that I don’t have a lot of my friend’s phone numbers stored in my mobile phone. This is because we tend to communicate via a mesh of social networking platforms – Twitter, Facebook, Pownce, Jaiku, Brightkite, FriendFeed, Ustream, our blogs, etc. Thus we rarely actually talk on a mobile phone, we merely use it to connect via those other channels.

So the big question now, after this FAIL for my Mental Detox Week, is what to do next? I think the answer is to be more mindful of my use of technology and to try and connect more into the physical world. To that end it’s time to walk the dog.

PS: for the record Steve had a FAIL early morning yesterday and Hissohathair is still hanging in there but missing his iPod on the bus.