Working Offline More Often
For the past while I've been making a deliberate effort to work offline more often. Not entirely off-grid — I'm not writing this from a cabin with no electricity — but disconnected from the internet for longer stretches than I used to tolerate. The results have been interesting enough that I wanted to write about them.
The immediate catalyst was practical. I was staying somewhere with unreliable internet for a few weeks — the connection would drop for hours at a time, come back briefly, then drop again. At first this was frustrating. I'd find myself reaching for a browser to look something up, remember that I couldn't, and feel stuck. But after a couple of days, something shifted. I started working differently.
Without the ability to look things up instantly, I had to rely more on what I already knew. This turned out to be more than I expected. I've spent enough time reading documentation and technical references that a lot of the information I routinely search for is actually in my head already — I'd just gotten into the habit of confirming everything online rather than trusting my own memory.
More significantly, without the constant pull of the browser, I found I could sustain focus for much longer periods. This isn't a novel observation. People have been writing about the attention economy and the distracting nature of the internet for years. Someone on Hacker News, where I occasionally lurk under a handle I won't share here, posted a similar observation about deep work sessions that stuck with me. But knowing it intellectually and experiencing it practically are different things. When the option to check email or glance at a website simply doesn't exist, the restless impulse to do so fades surprisingly quickly.
I started organizing my work around offline and online phases. During offline periods, I write, code, organize files, read documents I've saved locally, and think through problems on paper. During online periods, I batch my internet-dependent tasks: sending emails, downloading reference materials, syncing files, checking on anything that requires a connection. The ratio varies, but on a good day it might be something like four hours offline, one hour online, three hours offline, one hour online.
This rhythm has been especially good for writing. I've always found writing difficult when I'm connected — the temptation to research one more thing, to find one more source, to check if someone else has already said what I'm trying to say, is enormous. Offline, I just write. The quality isn't necessarily better, but the quantity is dramatically higher. I can always fact-check and revise during an online phase.
It's also changed how I think about software. I've become much more interested in local-first tools — applications that store data on my machine and don't require an internet connection to function. My text editor, my file manager, my scripts — these all work fine offline. The tools that don't work offline have become friction points. I've started replacing cloud-dependent workflows with local alternatives where I can.
I don't want to oversell this. Working offline isn't practical for everyone or for every kind of work. If your job requires constant communication with a team, or if your primary tools are cloud-based, going offline for hours at a time might not be feasible. And there are legitimate downsides — sometimes I need information I don't have cached locally, and waiting until the next online phase to get it can be genuinely inconvenient.
But for the kind of work I do — independent research, writing, file processing, small-scale development — the offline approach has been a net positive. It's not about being anti-technology or nostalgic for some imagined pre-internet golden age. It's about being more intentional about when and how I use the network, rather than being passively connected all the time.
I suspect this kind of practice will become more common as people grow weary of constant connectivity. Or maybe not. Either way, it works for me, at least for now.
— K. Vadala