Today the holidays start for our students, which gives me a few days respite to catch up with some work and update the blog.

When they get back we'll be starting our screen fast. This is something that we try to do once a year here. We encourage people to fast from 'screens' for a month. We've discovered that things like movies, video games and Facebook can really be a distraction for people, so we try to introduce a period where we're fasting from those kind of things. It's optional, of course, but I think that most the of the students sign up for it.

I take part too. I don't play video games or watch TV much, and I use a computer for work a lot, so I pledge to fast from 'non-productive' screen time. This means no movies, games and so on - which is not a huge blow because my leisure time involves other things. What it does mean that I stop unconstructive use of the computer, which is fairly common for me. All that meaningless internet surfing I do goes out of the window. I will use the computer for work and for anything else that is productive - such as blog updates.