It now has been roughly a month since I disabled subscriptions for practically every mailing list I belong to. Initially I had to get used to the fact that checking Gmail constantly for new mail was a fruitless exercise. Otherwise it's been nice.
I definitely have more time on my hands. Python-dev has been my hobby for so long I had somewhat forgotten what it was like to just work on a coding project purely for fun and just for myself. Not having to answer to the Python community for the quality of my code or test coverage, not having to document everything, or have to argue for why I did something is rather freeing. I can see why Neal Norwitz is on perpetual sabbatical from python-dev.
But I do miss being plugged in. Having to get my news through Twitter about what is going on still feels odd -- this was made especially true when PEP 383 was accepted and I didn't even know the PEP existed until people tweeted about the acceptance.
And I still think about my long-standing projects. I am thinking about how to handle the Mercurial transition and what workflow we should end up with. I still think about what I might need to implement in C for importlib in order to prevent people from lynching me when I bootstrap it in at the implementation of import. This means that once I am done defending my thesis proposal I will be coming back to python-dev.
But I suspect I won't rejoin every mailing list I disabled delivery for. And I also expect I will be much quicker on telling people to move over to python-ideas along with very liberally using the muting feature in Gmail. I have had a taste of freedom from senseless arguments and whining and I don't plan to go back to it without a fight.
One month down, two more to go.
