And I've been really focusing on this habit. It's now part of who I am. But I gave up other things to be able to keep reading that much. I don't have the habit of watching YouTube, except for when I want to research about a topic, like an author interview or a book review I am curious to watch, or the occasional video my partner will invite me to watch with him.

I also gave up mainstream social media years ago. I still have a Mastodon account that I've been using less and less. I've been feeling I'm not getting too much out of it, and I get overwhelmed by the different topics going on, all showing up one after the other, I don't like the Twitter-like format that much.

I still subscribe to a few newsletters, and I still use a RSS feed reader. I think RSS feeds are great for the “consume at your pace” type of deal. But even this will overwhelm me. I have been adding personal blogs feeds to my reader and now I have 70 feeds I'm subscribed to. And it's a lot for me! I want to get it down to a more manageable number.

So, I guess, what I want to say is that I've been experiencing information overload, and it's competing with my favorite downtime activity, which is reading books.

Maybe I've been so much time away from the current noisy and chaotic internet feeds that my level of comfort with new information coming at me has changed. I want some space.

I've deleted my RSS feed app from my phone. I will read my feeds only when I'm at a computer, once or twice a week. I think it will make this activity more mindful. My next step will be do some curation on my list of feeds to make it less overwhelming.

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Post 35/100 of 100DaysToOffload challenge (Round 2)!

#100DaysToOffload #100Days #Blaugust2024 #Blaugust #journal #digitalminimalism #socialmedia

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By Noisy Deadlines Minimalist in progress, nerdy, introvert, skeptic. I don't leave without my e-reader.

And I realized that we had 3 active video streaming subscriptions: Netflix, Amazon Prime and Curiosity Stream+Nebula. After some reflections with my partner, we decided to let go of Netflix and Amazon Prime. Why?

We watched a total of 19 shows and movies on those 2 platforms last year. We already saw all the shows we were interested in catching up, such as: Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power, The Expanse, The Witcher, One Piece, Good Omens, Wheel of Time. Honestly, we weren’t that interested in continuing watching future seasons for most of them. And looking at the catalogue for other things to watch we weren’t that thrilled.

Add that to the fact that Amazon Prime will start showing adds and they will charge more to have an ads-free experience. For Netflix, we were already paying the option with no ads. That’s roughly a total $340 CAD a year (not including the increase for Amazon Prime with no ads). We’ve decided we could use that money (and the time!) to get and do more of what we truly love: books for me and video games for him.

We are still keeping the Curiosity Stream subscription with Nebula. Both of them are totally ad-free with interesting enough content to entertain us. I’ve been wanting to watch more documentaries on Curiosity Stream so minimizing our video streaming options will help with that.

We always have the Public Library to borrow movies and shows. We don’t mind waiting to get a hold of a movie. We watched only 7 movies in 2023, so we are not big movie consumers anyway.

So, yeah, a little bit of digital minimalism to start the year! It’s always nice to use technology more intentionally and mindfully. And at this moment of our lives, we just want less distractions and more focus on what brings us most joy. 😊

—-

Post 66/100 of 100DaysToOffload challenge!

#100DaysToOffload #100Days #digitalminimalism #minimalism #attentionresistance

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By Noisy Deadlines Minimalist in progress, nerdy, introvert, skeptic. I don't leave without my e-reader.

I already have only one home screen. I’ve always limited myself from having multiple screens to swipe to. I already don’t have any social media apps, apart from Whatsapp and Telegram, which my family still use to communicate with me. But of course there is room for improvement.

First, I thought about my main distractors currently:

1) Emails: this one has been my major distraction. Some days I will check it every 5 minutes for no reason. 🫤

2) Internet Browser: there’s a world of distraction accessible through a browser. I have all my bookmarks synced to the browser on my phone. Very tempting!

After some reflection and talking to other people about similar experiences, a clever solution is to simply remove the distracting apps from the home screen. So that if I want to use them, I have to actively search for them. That creates friction and removes the automatic response of opening them mindlessly. It creates more intentionality, which is exactly what I’m looking for.

So I removed the following apps from my Home Screen:

• Email apps (Outlook and ProtonMail).
• Browser (Firefox/Safari): I actually uninstalled Firefox and installed Firefox Focus instead, with no distracting bookmarks.
• Outlook Calendar: Outlook has the email and Calendar integrated in one app (which is very annoying). I replaced it with the native iOS Calendar app so that I don’t have to stumble upon my emails when checking my schedule.
• Whatsapp and Telegram: I only use these to communicate with my family abroad, so I thought I could use them more intentionally as well.
• Unused apps: I had some apps I was not using any more (like Journey). All gone.

I kept the other apps that are mostly utilities (authenticator, password manager), notes (Standard Notes), to-do app (Nirvana), health apps (includes my yoga, running and meditation apps), reading/book related apps, etc. I don’t consider those apps sources of distraction, and I like having them easily accessible.

This was my first try at cleaning up my phone home screen (before / after):

Cleanup: Before (left) and after (right)

I’ll see how this goes! I’m mostly curious to know how my email usage will change after this!

Some References:

• Video: “Simplifying w/Digital Minimalism: What's on My Phone”

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Post 23/100 of 100DaysToOffload challenge!

#100DaysToOffload #100Days #productivity #digitalminimalism

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By Noisy Deadlines Minimalist in progress, nerdy, introvert, skeptic. I don't leave without my e-reader.

And I know why it happened, for the most part: I reinstalled the Discord app on my phone. I have book clubs groups on Discord and also the Standard Notes group. I don't really need to check these groups all the time, but at some point in the past weeks I thought it would be nice to have the app at my fingertips. You know, why not have it ready to go when I'm on my lunch break to check what was going on? It turns out I can't be moderate about it. I started checking all the groups early in the morning, during breakfast and then in the mornings and afternoons while I'm at work... and at night before bed. And since I was on the phone, why not open up my browser and check Mastodon? And check my RSS feed? And why not go into a rabbit hole searching for a recipe online? This week I finally took notice of my behaviour: what is going on?

It was a behaviour change, and I'm almost sure it was triggered by having the Discord app readily available for me to use. My willpower is limited so having a shiny tool like Discord diminishes my ability to maintain focus. And it spiralled out of control.

So I'm making my phone less interesting:

1. I've deleted the Discord app

2. I've deleted from my browser all the links/favorites to websites that would pull my attention.

3. And I'm replacing my mindless browsing on my phone with reading a book on my Kobo, or just being alone with my thoughts.

The goal here is to reject the model of my phone as my constant companion, and use it more intentionally.

“Efforts to deepen your focus will struggle if you don’t simultaneously wean your mind from a dependence on distraction.” ― Cal Newport “Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World”

-- Post 16/100 of 100DaysToOffload challenge!

#100DaysToOffload #100Days #journal #attentionresistance #digitalminimalism

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By Noisy Deadlines Minimalist in progress, nerdy, introvert, skeptic. I don't leave without my e-reader.

This weekend I did the 24 hours phone separation exercise. For about a month the author proposes some activities to help us prepare for this “trial separation”.

Preparation

The preparation activities included:

• An assessment of my current relationship with my phone: what do I love about it? What I don’t love about it? What changes do I notice in myself when I pick it up and spend time with it? What would I like my new relationship with my phone to look like?
• Pay attention and notice the situations in which I use my phone. Does my body posture change? What is my emotional state before and after I use it? How do I feel when I realize I don’t have my phone? How do I feel while I’m using it?
• Track data: I used the iOS Screen Time feature to analyze how many times I picked up my phone and how I used it throughout 1 week.
  • I picked up my phone 27 times per day
  • I spent 2h 40 min on a daily average
• Delete all social media apps: I’ve done that a couple of years ago.
• Build a “speed bump” before I pick up my phone. Ask myself the WWW questions:
  • What For: What am I picking my phone to do?
  • Why Now: Why am I picking up my phone now instead of later?
  • What Else: What else could I do right now besides checking my phone?
• Get in touch with offline activities I enjoy doing (and do them without my phone)
• Turn off notifications: I’ve done that a couple of years ago. I leave only notifications from “real people” (phone calls, text messages)
• Delete unused apps, leave only apps that are “tools”. Delete all other “junk food/slot machine” apps.
• Reorganize the phone Home Screen. Remove all temptations.
• Stop, breathe, meditate. Practice mindfulness.

The Trial Separation

I used the Freedom app on my phone to block apps and distracting web pages. I didn’t even look exactly what was being blocked, I just scheduled for it to start after I went to sleep on Friday night and end 24 hours later.

I woke up on Saturday and went to my yoga mat for my morning meditation/yoga. I use an app on my phone for that. And I noticed it wasn’t loading any classes. I wondered why and after restarting my phone, checking if the wi-fi was working and trying re-opening the app I realized: “OH! It’s today, I’ve turned it all off! ” I thought I had set it up in a way that I wouldn’t be out of my yoga/meditation apps but, yeah, I was wrong.

That was the first interesting discovery: my phone is useful for my mindfulness practice. It helps me, it’s a good tool for that. I probably took it for granted. And that’s okay because I remembered I could load my app from my desktop computer, so that’s what I did. Crisis averted.

I didn’t look at my phone during breakfast like I always do to check the news, the daily Dilbert comic strip, and the weather. I had a haircut appointment in the morning which is a 10-minute walk from home. I got ready to leave without checking the weather on my phone, I used my judgment by looking out the window. I can say I was slightly overdressed, it was warmer than I thought. And that’s okay, I just had to remove one layer and I was fine.

Later in the day I sat down to read and felt the urge to open up my phone and check something. I didn’t know exactly why or what. It just felt like my brain was craving for online information: the news, emails, messages, it doesn’t matter, something thrilling. Then I remembered I was cut off from 99% of my apps and I couldn’t check anything online. Webpages weren’t opening. I used the “WWW” questions mentioned before and went back to reading my book. That was an interesting realization: even when I decide that I will read a book, my brain wants to look at my phone. It’s like an unconscious twitch. Like I’ve been conditioned to pick up the phone every time I pause.

I had my meals without having my phone with me. I could still receive messages from real people, so it wasn't like I was totally offline. I could have chosen to just turn off my phone and put it in a drawer for 24 hours, but I chose not to. I don’t think I have a terrible relationship with my phone, I wanted to see how I could get even better.

Lessons Learned

This has been a good experiment. I can say that the apps that distract me the most on my phone are:

• Web browser
• Discord
• Email app

I removed the email and Discord apps from my Home Screen. Now I have to use the app search or go to the App Library screen if I want to open them. That may seem like it would not have any impact, but it worked for me. Just because they are not right in front of my eyes when I take a look at my Home Screen, it created a “speed bump” and I don't open them without thinking.

I removed the web browsers from a prominent spot on my Home Screen. I hid them away in a folder. I still think browsers are useful as tools, so I will treat them as such.

I have only one screen on my phone which is the Home Screen. In it are the apps I want to have quick access to, all the rest is in the App Library.

This small change solved my unconscious urge to open up and check e-mail and Discord, for example.

Also, the exercises suggested in the book actually had an interesting effect on me: I now notice the moment I have the urge to check my phone, so I can pause, reflect and decide if that’s the right action at the moment. Maybe just the fact of having spent some time thinking about my phone usage imbued me with this mindful attitude towards it.

#journal #phone #noisymusings #digitalminimalism

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By Noisy Deadlines Minimalist in progress, nerdy, introvert, skeptic. I don't leave without my e-reader.

After the realization something clicked in my head: I just decided that was not a behaviour I wanted to practice anymore. I also observed that my phone was my twitch. It was easy enough to reach out and start some “doom scrolling”. This post “How My Digital Lifestyle is Changing” brings the definition of “doom scrolling” which I found interesting. So, yeah, my digital lifestyle is changing as well.

And every time we stop doing an addictive behaviour we better have a substitute. A more fulfilling one. Cal Newport in his book “Digital Minimalism” says that if we white-knuckle through a “digital declutter” without substituting the old behaviour with a better one, we will go back to the old behaviour. And social media, specifically, are basically a replacement for social interaction. We think it will fulfill our “social bucket” but then we are caught up in its addictive algorithms and the quality social connection we expected is not there. Cal Newport suggests that we need to think about high quality leisure activities to replace the time we would have spent otherwise (like doom scrolling).

For me, reading, writing, long walks with my partner and yoga were my substitutes last month. I fulfilled the social part of the equation by engaging with my city's local science-fiction and fantasy book club. They've been having virtual meet-ups since the pandemic started. I attended one meeting yesterday and had lots of fun! Since I'm an introvert I don't crave a whole lot of social interaction, so that was the perfect cup of tea.

After I felt I was disengaged enough from the scrolling addictive behaviour, I started exploring the Fediverse to see how it was different from the major social media platforms. I have a Mastodon account now. At first I thought I would fall into the same old doom scrolling pattern, but since it's decentralized and it doesn't have the ads/news monetizing cycle, I don't feel the addictive pull. I access it on my own terms and it doesn't create that craving or FOMO feeling for me. I'll keep on experimenting.

I just saw this video today by The Minimalists that I think gets to one of the main issue with social media, and it is by design. Food for thought.

#socialmedia #attentionresistance #internet #noisymusings #deletefacebook #digitalminimalism

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By Noisy Deadlines Minimalist in progress, nerdy, introvert, skeptic. I don't leave without my e-reader.

Being aware

I've been thinking about the attention economy and social media addiction since at least 2016.

I created my Facebook account in 2009. After Facebook introduced the bottomless scrolling newsfeed with companies advertising inside the platform, I started to get annoyed by it. But at the same time I developed an addiction to it. I remember that feeling of logging in to Facebook and scrolling for a couple hours only to realize it was a waste of time. But everybody I knew was (is) there: high school friends, friends I made at a training course in Sweden, family, co-workers, bloggers, etc. This was before the Cambridge Analytica scandal but I remember seeing those “personality polls” they used to get information. I don't think I ever clicked on those, but they were everywhere.

Trying to remove distractions but still using it

I decided to get rid of Facebook's feed by “unfollowing” everyone I knew. This was before there were plugins or extensions that could hide your entire timeline. Then I used plugins extensively to avoid the feed and all the ads. I was only interested in participating in some Groups that organized local meet-ups, for example. So I used tricks to only see the Groups when I logged in and avoided all the other distracting things on the page.

Long story short, all those strategies weren't getting to the core of the problem. I started to join more groups and I was still checking Facebook every day, several times a day.

Deactivation

I read some books, articles and scientific papers about social media, attention and addiction. I did “digital detox” weekend sessions. But I still wasn't ready to delete everything. Social (media) pressure is pervasive!

A really good article I read around 2018 that opened my eyes was this one: Be a pioneer – delete Facebook by Jaron Lanier. I tweeted this article at the time (oh, the irony!)

Then I heard about the Center for Humane Technology and got to know Tristan Harris's work. People were starting to have deep discussions about the issues with social media and it reached mainstream.

In December 2018 I deleted my Instagram account.

A few months later I decided to make an experiment and deactivate Facebook for some time. I deactivated it in 2019.

But the thing about deactivating Facebook is that anytime you reopen the website and you have the password saved in your browser, and it logs in, it will cancel the deactivation. That happened to me with friends sending me an innocent link to an article that was inside Facebook and BAM! my account was online again. (Since then I deleted all saved passwords from my browsers.) Then I would have to go to Settings and deactivate Facebook again.

Deletion

In July 2020 I decided to delete Facebook once and for all. So I did go through the menus to find out that it takes 30 days to delete the account!

A few days later, amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, I wanted to visit some Groups. I remember I was feeling anxious and lonely at the time so I gave in and I was in Facebook again. I said to myself: “OK, just this last time, but I am not sure I want to delete it yet”.

I kept my Facebook deactivated up until today, when I decided to FINALLY delete it! And I did. So now I'll forget about it. I will block facebook.com on my browsers so that I don't accidentally log in again in the next 30 days.

Twitter

Now, Twitter wasn't bothering me too much anymore. But I wanted to delete my account because I had data there since 2009. I took a quick look before I deleted it and there were some awful tweets at the beginning, totally pointless. Twitter is deleted as well.

I will list below some of the main resources I came across that helped me reflect on this subject.

Articles:

• Ethics of the Attention Economy: The Problem of Social Media Addiction Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 October 2020 by Vikram R. Bhargava and Manuel Velasquez
• Be a pioneer – delete Facebook by Jaron Lanier
• delete your facebook by Matt Baer
• Beyond # Delete Facebook: More Thoughts on Embracing the Social Internet Over Social Media by Cal Newport
• Top Economists Study What Happens When You Stop Using Facebook by Cal Newport
• Tristan Harris: Tech Is ‘Downgrading Humans.’ It’s Time to Fight Back
• Facebook’s Attention Machine, Explained

Books:

• Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now by Jaron Lanier
• The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads by Tim Wu
• Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World by Cal Newport
• Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman
• The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power by Shoshana Zuboff
• Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy by James Williams
• Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked by Adam Alter

#socialmedia #attentionresistance #internet #noisymusings #deletefacebook #digitalminimalism

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By Noisy Deadlines Minimalist in progress, nerdy, introvert, skeptic. I don't leave without my e-reader.

🎈 Things I write about :

Sections:

🎨 #NoisyMusings: a little bit of everything 📂 #Productivity: organization, methods, apps, GTD 📚 #Books: everything book related

Some Topics:

#apps | #Nirvana (the app, not the band) | #Todoist | #GTD | #MSTodo | #notes | #journal | #journaling | #BookReview | #ReadingList | #Reading | #ReaderGoals | #BookWyrm | #TheStorygraph | #weeknotes | #podcast | #GTDnotes | #100DaysToOffload | #projects | #goals | #DnD

#internet | #socialmedia | #attentionresistance #minimalism | #digitalminimalism #outdoors | #Hiking | #winter | #iceskating |#skiing |#music | #heavymetal | #puzzle | #health | #tech | #linux

The thing is: there is so much information available on the internet and I don't want to let an algorithm show me what to see. That's why I always love [moderated] discussion forums. It's theme focused and generally people there are looking for information and trying to help each other. Social media has some of it too, but 99% of it is just showing off.

I remember it was not used to be that way. It really was a more personal approach where we could connect and share ideas with close friends. Now it's an ad driven world where quantity matters more than quality. I used to love social media. I joined the first “connect to friends” websites back when “social media” was not even a noun. I used to have an account at SixDegrees.com. It was launched 22 years ago. It was shut down in 2001. Then I used MySpace (not my favorite), Orkut (2007, I remember there were hundreds of useless groups and hate speech started to build there) and then, Facebook (2009).

At the beginning I used Facebook to connect to a group of international colleagues from a course I've taken abroad. Facebook was not about news or companies profiles. There were only people. There were ads, yes, but they were less obnoxious. At some point all these companies started to show up on Facebook and ads started to overflow our timelines. And then viral videos. And then the non-chronological timeline. That annoyed me a lot. A timeline where you had no control of. Then I started to realize something was wrong with Facebook and with what my contacts were publishing there. It was all fake. It was all just for show. And I include myself in this madness. It's time to stop the madness.

I've long deleted my timeline on Facebook, meaning: I don't see anything on my timeline. I was occasionally logging to Facebook to check out some groups. And that's all I did there. I deleted my photo albums. And I'm still trying to delete my comments and likes but there's no way to automate that. I have to go to every single post and delete it manually. I'm still searching for a better solution.

I wonder if I delete my account, all my data will be deleted or Facebook will still have that data in their servers. I wanted to do a full delete from their servers. I don't know if that's possible yet.

For now, I deactivated my account. I'll be away from Facebook for 30 days.

#socialmedia #facebook #digitalminimalism #attentionresistance #noisymusings

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By Noisy Deadlines Minimalist in progress, nerdy, introvert, skeptic. I don't leave without my e-reader.

I've been thinking a lot about social media lately.

Actually, I've been thinking about it for a long time. And I've taken action to minimize my exposure: I deleted my Instagram and Pinterest account, I used extensions to eliminate Facebook's annoying timeline, I unfollowed hundreds of profiles on Twitter. But I still use social media a little.

I still check Twitter for local weather and traffic news or alerts. And I like to check the latest tweets from some cool authors I follow. I connect with people using the Facebook Groups platform. I have a LinkedIn account. I occasionally go check Reddit.

And after all this time reflecting, tweaking and observing my behavior I still think that the minimum amount of social media usage is not that beneficial. Maybe the benefits do not completely outweighs the downsides.

I can list at least 5 books I've read in the past that made me rethink the way I engage with social media and with the Internet in general:

• The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads by Tim Wu
• Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport
• Bored and Brilliant: How Spacing Out Can Unlock Your Most Productive & Creative Self by Manoush Zomorodi
• You Are Not a Gadget by Jaron Lanier
• Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now by Jaron Lanier

And now I'm reading Cal Newport's Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World. And just like Tristan Harris saying that social media apps today are like slot machines, Cal Newport says they are the “new smoking”:

“The tycoons of social media have to stop pretending that they’re friendly nerd gods building a better world and admit they’re just tobacco farmers in T-shirts selling an addictive product to children. Because, let’s face it, checking your “likes” is the new smoking.” ― Cal Newport, Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World

Which, in the end, is saying that they are extremely addictive, no doubt.

And I worry about it. Have I become addicted without even knowing? How did those websites and apps changed my behavior? Is my mind being hijacked? Am I aware?

I don't have answers right now but I am feeling that after reading Cal Newport's new book I'm gonna have a radical change on how I use social media and the Internet.

#socialmedia #digitalminimalism #noisymusings #attentionresistance

Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash

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By Noisy Deadlines Minimalist in progress, nerdy, introvert, skeptic. I don't leave without my e-reader.