Could you abstain from all media for a week, or even 24 hours? You’re not doing so well right now, are you? It’s January, so why not eat all the food you like, but spend a day or more cut off from communication?

E-mail-free Fridays are the lightest form of media diet. A few companies, including Nestlé Rowntree and British Energy, turn off their e-mail systems every Friday, encouraging phone calls or face-to-face meetings instead. In firms where it’s taken off, e-mail use has dropped by 75 per cent.

Declare e-mail bankruptcy when your inbox is overflowing with unread messages. You send a message to your friends apologising for not getting back to them, then delete all the unread e-mails and start again. Pop star Moby did it last year, as have various internet luminaries. It’s like a colonic irrigation for your media consumption.

Media fasting is turning everything off for a day, a week or longer. No TV, no internet, no telephone, no recorded music, no magazines or papers. After author Tim Ferriss took a ten-day fast, he wrote, “I felt like I’d had a two-year vacation from computers.”

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