Events like Earth Hour raise awareness about our “planet in peril”, but as I’ve said in the past, they don’t have a positive impact on the environment. You need to do the little things to truly make a difference. I try to do my part. I always take a stainless steel mug to Starbucks in the morning, for example. There’s always room for improvement though.

For a little over a week now, I’ve been trying to break one of my worst habits. I don’t know how it started, but I’m one of those people that never turns the computer off when I’m not using it. For some reason I just got into the habit of always leaving it running. Laptops are a different story, because you shut the lid and it goes to sleep, but I’ve always left my desktop on for some reason. I’ve always had it configured to turn the monitors off after a while, but never the computer itself.

I guess I like having the computer immediately available when I want to use it. Really though, waking up from sleep mode doesn’t take very long at all. Slightly longer on my desktop than on either of my laptops, but still not bad.

I’ve been really good about using sleep mode for a week now, and I think I can keep it up. I’m going to kick my “leave the computer on” habit for good.