I forgot my laptop at home and had the most productive day ever

I still don't have a laptop, and I don't tend to listen to music in headphones. I have about a 20-minute walk to class, and I find that it's either relaxing, to just walk and not do anything else, or I'm deep in thought, considering the day's lecture topics, project ideas, implementation ideas for a current project, or any number of other things.

I have often found myself disappointed that so many people are wrapped up in technology and oblivious to the world around them. I think that if more people allowed themselves some downtime, everyone would be a lot less stressful and more friendly.

This is a case of going from feeding brain fast food and actually giving it a five course meal to enjoy.

Without your laptop you actually had to use your brain and not rely on brain fast food and use your brain for what it was intended, complex thoughts.

Now, put that into your schedule, every 3rd and 20th of the month you will not even touch your laptop and you'll have more miracles occur in your life.

Long before microsoft, there was SAP (Systems Analysis & Programming). A bunch of funky long haired ex IBM programmers who perfected their applications first consulting with their clients (big business). Then sitting down at a desk and creating their applications with nothing but pen, paper and cards. Programming stripped bare. Then typing in (or transferring by punch card) the application(s) into the clients own machine (they couldn't afford personal IBM minis) and configuring it.

Development has speed up a lot since then with developers working with live code at the console. Has it got that much better?

I couldn't read that text and had the most productive day ever! Is it just me or someone else also noticed that a black font on a brown background with little gray circles is not conductive of reading?

I try to spend two weeks out of each year without computers or the internet - usually one week off for every six months on. That may sound like a lot, but in practice it hardly matters because I spend such a huge % of all my other time on here, and it is very possible to get work done without a computer. I find that I get many of my best ideas when I'm forced to take a step back and live in the non-tech world for awhile.

If you spend all your time doing $X it's a good idea to take a break from doing $X every once in a while.

This would actually be a good idea to do about once every 2 weeks or once a month. Anyone else do this?