Then I started using Twitter.

And never stopped. For the last eight months I’ve tweeted every day, with the occasional weekend off. I tweet eight, 10, 12 times a day: when I put up a new blog post, when one of my stories is published, when I need a source, when a random thought simply needs to be shared – though in hindsight some of those would have been better left unsaid.

Until last week.

I took an honest-to-goodness vacation away from email, blogging, Twitter, LinkedIn and everything connected to being connected.

Guess what?

The sky didn’t fall. The earth stayed on its axis. And the bottom didn’t fall out of my business – I even had a few assignments in my inbox when I got back.

It was easier than I thought to unplug. It helped to be stuck with the middle of nowhere, the only available Internet access whatever could be siphoned off a neighbor’s unsecured wireless connection.

Going without was good for the soul and apparently didn’t hurt my standing on Twitter – I returned to a few dozen new followers.

So how to unplug?

Tell people you’re leaving. If you stop tweeting without explanation, followers may think you’ve given up on Twitter. Give them a head’s up. If you don’t want to broadcast the fact that you’re leaving town for safety reasons, be a bit cagey about what you’re doing. “I’ll be taking a break from here for the next few days” works. So does “Busy elsewhere. See everyone in a week.”

Automate. If you can’t bear going a whole week without saying something, use a tool such as TweetLater or TwitResponse to send tweets at predesignated intervals in your absence.

Go mobile. Leave your laptop home and tweet from your iPhone or BlackBerry using an application like Twitterrific, PocketTweets or TwitterBerry. Twitter’s applications list has a lot more.

Tweet from vacation, sparingly. Who wants to spend their precious downtime tethered to a machine, even if it’s only a cell phone? Limit the number of times you log on. Or allow yourself a specific time of day or amount of time to check in, update your status and upload vacation pics.

Then go play.

Got your own story of going off the social media grid? Share!