MC's journal

Setting Orange, the 24 day of Confusion in the YOLD 3190

Experiment in Digital minimalism

I recently read Cal Newport's book Digital Minimalism. It really resonated with me, despite (or because of?) being glued to my computer many hours of the day.

Cal suggests a month of digital decluttering, at first cutting off everything that your job and other obligations don't depend on. At the end of the month you evaluate what, if anything, is to be let back inside.

I did a decluttering plan for April. It ended up being an ongoing project when I'm writing this in June.

My decluttering plan

I'm the first to admit that my decluttering isn't very complete and that I allow myself a lot of leeway. Some people almost ditch all Internet communications during their decluttering month. I didn't do that. That was maybe a mistake? Maybe I will have another go and make it a more complete cutoff.

Mail

  • Stop using mail notifications. Up to now I used a scheduled fetching of e-mail and updated my Emacs mode line to tell me how many unread I have in my main inbox after applying filters. I turned it off.
  • Schedule dealing with mail.

IM and chat

  • Start a profile (mostly family) in Signal to stop all notifications from people outside that circle.
  • Schedule reading of messages from other people, and especially messages to Signal groups.
  • Leave all XMPP MUCs.
  • Use XMPP only for direct messages.
  • Keep using the private IRC server and the channel with my closest hacker friends. Schedule my participation to mornings and afternoons. This typically means I detach the tmux with the IRC client. Drop other IRC networks completely.
  • Use IRC/Matrix at work with scheduled participation.
  • Use Slack only at work. Use less channels and mostly use it for direct messages. Try scheduling participation.

Phone

  • Turn off sound. Only use vibrating notifications and a blinking LED. Work phone still has sound.
  • Keep the phone turned off during some of the day.
  • Keep work and personal phone in another room when working.

Note that I don't usually get any phone calls or SMS, usually it's just Signal or XMPP.

"Social" "Media"

Pause Facebook and Fedi completely.

Youtube

  • Youtube Shorts: Total pause.
  • Youtube in general: Careful. Only watch one clip after thinking about it. Don't be tempted to continue watching others. Exception: Music mix playlists.

Blogs

  • Blogs: Keep only web comics and very few other blogs on phone.
  • Move rest (over 100!) to Elfeed on my hackerstation. Read in scheduled batches.

News

  • Read only one newspaper, and read it only once per day, typically over morning coffee.

    Instead of reading on DN's constantly updated web page, I decided to read it on their "e-paper" site, which gives me the choice to read in PDF or individual articles, but updated only once a day.

    Reading like this makes it obvious when I've come to the end of the paper, instead of the web page, which might have updates on it every time I visit, usually many times over the day.

  • No TV news whatsoever.

Conclusions

The phone plan in particular did wonders, especially filtering notifications in Signal. I'm not distracted by notifications all the time any more.

Having the phone notifications and sound turned off unfortunately meant I missed a few calls from health professionals I really didn't want to miss. Dammit. And, of course, they always call from some unknown or hidden number so I can't easily add them to any filter even if I wanted to.

I don't get much mail these days, so removing my notification didn't make much difference, I think. I had problems with the scheduling, though. I kept checking for e-mail manually again and again. Not sure how to keep that to scheduled times. Perhaps it's just easier to have a silent notification for the main mailbox anyway.

I dropped Matrix at work and only used the bridged OFTC IRC channel #tillitis. Scheduled to check a few times a day. That, unfortunately, made me lose attempts to contact me directly over Matrix, so I had to start running a Matrix client again.

Slack is still a problem. I use it mostly for direct messages and that's a big change compared to the all-day meeting. I'm trying to keep my work messages to Github issues, PRs, and comments, but as you know it takes two to tango.

Like I said in the last status post, I'm thinking about turning off my XMPP server. Traffic is close to zero. Even presence traffic, the main complaint by some people against XMPP, is mostly silent! I think most people running XMPP clients these days just connect and not change their presence during the entire session.

XMPP is mostly me chatting with some friends sometimes. Friends I also have other ways of reaching.

One thing, though, is that my cottage surveillance bot reaches me over XMPP. I'll have to do that differently. Perhaps considering sending ∗shock∗ ∗horror∗ SMS!? Or maybe it's just an IRC bot? ∗phew∗

I decided to transfer my XMPP traffic to another server: I'm now back on mc at lysator.liu.se for XMPP. My own server will probably be turned off soon. It might resurface later, perhaps, but then in another shape.

I also uninstalled the XMPP client on my phone. Still thinking about that. I would like an easy way to transfer links to interesting articles between my computer and my phone and I used XMPP for that earlier. Perhaps I should just try SyncThing on a text file or something?

During the month I started using SimpleX chat. That complicated things a little. The mobile app can't filter notifications and they can't be turned off globally.

I'm also running the CLI client, but that's another session, not shared with the mobile client. I'm part of a few channels, but I'm thinking about leaving them at least on the mobile identity. It's just too much.

I was succesful in not logging in to Facebook or my Fedi instance hackers.town. Facebook is mostly for my historical fencing club anyway, and I was unable to attend at all for two month, so that didn't matter much.

Avoiding TV news was easy. I don't have a regular TV and I'm not in the habit of watching TV at all.

The blogs plan worked. I've scheduled reads in Elfeed and it's a bit overwhelming at times with more than a 100 subscriptions. I should probably try to weed out things from my subscriptions. I really, really like blogs, but it's been a burden lately.

Written News… didn't work so well. Kept coming back to reading the web sites of several newspapers again and again during the day. I've tried harder to just keep to the e-paper edition and lately it's been working better, I think.

Next step

Maybe a more complete decluttering? What would that look like?

For a month, perhaps during my vacation so it doesn't affect work much, stop using:

  • Personal mail.
  • XMPP.
  • IRC. Just the private server, remember?
  • SimpleX.
  • Signal? Oooh, hard one, especially for family and close friends. I'll have to warn them to reach me some other way. Perhaps temporarily moving my SIM card to a feature phone and use that? Whoa! Scary to have to take calls!
  • Slack? If this is a vacation that won't be hard for most of it.
  • Blogs. At least reading. Writing is probably OK.
  • Newspapers.
  • Youtube.

I'll think about it. Vacation is coming up!

Written by MC using Emacs and friends.