For several months now, I’ve made it a point to stay offline on weekends. During the work week I’m rather tolerant of the way the internet plays with time: how the 55 seconds it takes for a poorly-coded page to load can seem like an hour; how the time between when I sit down at the keyboard in the morning and when my son gets out of school can pass in the blink of an eye.

On the weekends, though, my time is just that: my time, and I want to be in charge of it. The older I get, the more protective I am of that, too. Come Friday evening, I turn off the laptop and swear — every single weekend — that I won’t sit down in front of it again until Monday morning. I like to think my computer’s glad for the time apart, too.

Ever since I began doing this, my weekends have grown exponentially productive in a non-productive sort of way. What I mean is that, rather than losing the weekend to researching and drafting outlines for future columns, answering email and reading the news — all things pertinent to my income during the week — I take an old-fashioned approach to Saturday and Sunday, the way pre-internet generations did. I don’t work, nor do I do anything that resembles my regular work week. (Evidently, this weekend Luddite thing is catching on.)

Instead, I read. (This weekend it was both New Moon and Eclipse, the second and third books in the Twilight series by Stephenie Meyers.) I watch movies. I lounge on the sofa with my iPhone headset jammed into my ears while listening to music. I veg.

Oh, sometimes that’s easier said than done, particularly if I’m behind on a writing deadline or have a client with a rush job who just can’t stand the thought of waiting 48 hours.

Or my mother, who seems to think that weekends are best spent forwarding the umpteen gazillion email jokes she received throughout the week from her senior citizen friends, the very same people who’ve been circulating the same damn email jokes for the past 3 years since they discovered the internet but, because they are senior citizens, they don’t remember having read and forwarded the damn things before.

And these, of course, are followed by the emails from my mother asking if I got all of the other emails she’d sent, and why aren’t I responding, and am I okay or am I sick? Because, being a senior citizen, she apparently can’t remember that I’ve told her every single Monday for months now that I do not read email over the weekend (and that even during the week I pretty much ignore all of those chain emails, too).

This week, however, she truly topped herself. Not only did she send 23 email forwards (down by half from last weekend, perhaps because I told her that I’m in the midst of a couple of very hectic weeks), but then she called to ask if I’d seen any of them. And when she got my voice mail since I also don’t answer the phone much over the weekend, either? Why, she sent me yet another email asking if I got the voice mail she’d left.

All of which makes me realize that my goal of unplugging over the weekend in order to protect my leisure time a bit more, and thereby make my work week more efficient, might actually be counterproductive since it means that I have to spend all day Monday reading and responding to the very crap I’d been seeking refuge from in the first place.