Back on New Years Day I went through yet another exercise in reducing infinities. This has been an on-going discussion with myself on how I consume media, especially since the advent of “always active” internet devices in your pocket (yes, this goes back to the early days of iPhones in the early 20teens). I thought I’d give myself a check-in one month in to see how things are going.
Read more: February infinities check-inRemoving media from the phone (mostly)
This has mostly been successful. Pretty much all direct access media (apps) have remained gone from my phone. I have not added (on purpose) access to my new media feeds on my phone. I will admit that I still end up on YouTube (app, mostly for music) and Facebook (via Safari) rabbit holes on the phone, but it generally feels like I’m tied to my phone a lot less. With everything happening in Minnesota, getting on Facebook to check in on friends on the ground has been essential. Which tells you that maybe social media’s real place in the world.
I thought I’d be able to use something like ScreenTime on iOS to track how much this has dropped. However, ScreenTime doesn’t seem to be smart enough to distinguish between things like Audible/PodCasts and actual screen time. At least, not in its standard pop-up notification and I don’t actually care enough to go dig into the data itself and see how trends have changed.
Overall, I give myself a B- here for implementing the change and then sticking to it. But I don’t get an A for the general usage of short form video on YouTube on my phone. If I can figure out how to break that habit, I’ll be trending toward an A.
Obtaining better control of my media feed (or, “Return of the RSS!”)
This one honestly surprised me. Evidently I’m not the only one who has decided that “The Algorithm” is an evil ploy by billionaires to destroy the brains of humanity with incremental dopamine hits. A lot (most?) websites still have an RSS protocol enabled so that you can at least get the news headlines in your RSS reader and then click through for the medium/long format writing (where I’ll define “short format” here to mean social media post length of <1000 characters).
Grade so far: A-. However, my RSS feeds have tended toward science news (with a bent toward astronomy), gaming, and Mac tech. So I think sometime this spring there’ll be a “Spring Cleaning and Restocking” edition since I probably don’t need to see essentially the same stories from both Kotaku and Ars Gaming every day.
Exercises in writing
One other thing that I have really enjoyed doing is getting my 20-25 minutes of writing in most morning. I am clearly not the first people to realize that journaling and/or writing every day (even if it’s only for my own eyes) is fantastic for my mental health. My 2025 Science Recap post took about three weeks to complete, and I’ve been missing having an obvious thing to work on. I’ve got a few other potential projects that are on a slow burn in the background but the exercise of writing is really the point here rather than the end product.
Grade so far: B+ for getting the main long-form piece done (trying for maybe on a month sounds about right…) but I need to do better on daily writing.
…but also posting on social media?
I did start posting stubs of this stuff to my LinkedIn feed. I’m not sure I’ll do that for every post…my Science Recap made sense for me to do. I think I’ll try to limit that to the truly long-form writing rather than stubs. And yes, I get the irony of me posting to social media whilst simultaneously attempting to get rid of all social media inputs. I have still been going to LinkedIn (on the computer) as my one relatively regular social media check-in.
Grade so far: B-…but this one may end up getting graded on a curve
Morning habits
This has also been one of the key changes. My (pre-work) morning habit is now:
- Coffee / tea (I got a “Teas of the World” subscription, so having black tea in the morning is now a nice break from coffee)
- Clear personal gmail to inbox zero (I’ve done a good job here of getting rid of most of my junk mail)
- RSS headlines scrolling to inbox zero
- NYTimes headlines check-in
- LATimes headline check-in
- 20 minutes of writing
…where I’ve also been able to add a 45-minute walk to work on top of this most mornings for podcasts/Audible listening (one major, major benefit of us moving so close to my office is that I have about a 2-2.5 mile walk to/from work every day).
Future check-ins
Check-ins like this give me a built-in “Start of the Month” writing prompt. I’ll come back to this in March and see how things are going and/or if any of the above bits and pieces are improving. One thing I’d like to do is to make sure that I get a long(er) form writing project out (per month) that’s not work related.
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