Become a human again — I: Stop your RSS feed and social addictions.
To efficiently start our process of self-improvement, you have to eradicate some useless and interruptive behaviors: news and social apps. They have no value.
You are not going to be cut off from the outside world
Perhaps “eradicate” and “no value” are too strong, but trust me, it will be fine.
By “eradicating”, I won’t tell you to shut down everything and forget to use Instagram, Facebook, or go back to the 90’s. I still use them from time to time (Instagram is still a challenge), but differently and less regularly. The point is, we all are over-connected. We forget whom and what we care about every day.
Humans are the slaves of technology, which have been created by human. Paradoxical.
I think you are as tired as I am about those moments:
- At work or school, in a meeting where everyone uses their smartphone (or computer), scrolling and tapping. Head down, no eye contact with you, perfect ignorance of others.
- In a restaurant where everybody takes pics of their plates or scrolling during eating in front of their friends all of the time. Disgusting.
A lot of people are like machines and slaves. Humans are the slaves of technology, technology that humanity has created. Paradoxical. I don’t pretend to be the only one who avoids all those bad habits. I try to improve myself every day by not consulting my iPhone during a meeting or with my friends.
It’s time to give you some tips and rules.
Breaking news: you are not a bot
A few years ago, I was a Social Network and News addict. RSS feed, Facebook, Twitter, I wanted to be everywhere; I wanted to know everything. But I’m a human, after all, not a computer or server.
This addiction is called FOMO: Fear of missing out.
You can’t stock and learn all external information of each day in your brain. You don’t have petaflop of storage in your brain. So stop it.
Your brain can be addicted to anything. People want to see the right value inside you. You can share these silly cat and buzz videos with your friends sometimes. But don’t be addicted to that. There is no value in being the first one to see buzz videos or know all of them.
You can detect FOMO addiction by listening to one of your friends says: “Ah ah, already saw it”. Did you notice that when you are sharing some buzz videos & news articles, some people say “Old!”, “Already seen it ahah, old you are!”. I’ve noticed it someday (I still do it sometimes), and the reaction is pretty absurd. Seriously, who cares? We have to stop that. Everyone doesn’t have to know everything.
Your smartphone will help you, but it will interrupt you every day if you do not educate it
If you are addicted to your smartphone, it’s because lots of apps are made to re-engage you the most, over sending you information, news, and notifications. There is a simple molecule being that: dopamine. Trust me, I have been working in this industry for a decade, and I know how it works:
- notifications,
- infinite scroll,
- recommendation algorithms,
- like feature, number of likes, achievements (dopamine shots)
- over-informations and contents.
If you are like me, you probably have a smartphone (not a phone). You are “socially connected”: Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, TikTok, news, messages & calls. But if you don’t configure all of this, it could be a loss of energy, it will not give you value every day.
Notifications = interruptions
We will see in the future Part III: “Stop multitasking your brain, be focused”, what are the worst daily interruptions you receive daily. Notifications are one of them, and notifications represent interruptions. The goal is to re-engage you on a service, which could lead to addiction or FOMO.
If you are an iOS user, I think you will understand this next use case. What is your reaction when this pop-up is displayed immediately after downloading and launching an app:
“Don’t allow!”
Your brain has understood that for a while, or maybe not. Because of FOMO, you may automatically choose “OK” to ensure you will not forget any new content. You should better understand that an app will produce some useless notifications if you are blindly accepting them.
Instead, this is how you should analyze that kind of pop-up:
- What’s the context, please?
- Do not understand why I need this? => Don’t allow it.
- Oups, I need it? I can re-enable it anyway in settings later…
Therefore, you are unconsciously going to refuse it, and you will be good at it. You will reject it mainly because it pops in front of you without warning and next because you don’t know why. The same applies to mailing list subscriptions when you create an account on a website. Read carefully stuff to not be spammed.
But notifications are useful when it gives you value. Here are some examples:
- notifications on your watch to stand up because you have been resting too long on your chair, or motivating you to run with the Runkeeper app = healthy value;
- display your friend’s 1:1 text messages = social value; (I’m not talking about message groups that could spam a lot)
- display tasks or calendar reminders = work value.
On the other side, notifications have no value and so will interrupt you when they:
- re-engage you to play again with your favorite game;
- send you sports news, but you don’t care about as specific theme;
- send you Facebook notifications about new posts or comments from a friend.
You can use your spare time for the last three listed things. But doing it all day is wasting your time. Then, be careful when you grant authorization for notifications. Select the ones that will give you value by reading them or launching the app.
Especially on iOS, the tip is to go into the advanced configuration. You can configure notifications and alerts precisely.
To resist the temptation, here is how I configured them:
- Facebook, Instagram, Mail: OFF (no sounds, no badges, nothing).
- I’m not using TikTok. Maybe it’s because of generation stuff too, let’s be honest. But I tested it, and I can conclude it’s the worst social network ever made to destroy your focus, time, and brain.
- Calendar: ON
- Messenger: enabled for some conversation, no sounds.
- Calls & Text Messages: all enabled. It is essential to everyone.
- Pro mail account or Slack: OFF. I use them for work, but just and only in case of emergency for my team. I never consult them on my device otherwise. By the way, they are in a “Forbidden” folder. During holidays, I uninstall them. If there is a strong emergency, we will call me. We will see it in detail in Part III: “Stop multitasking your brain, be focused”.
Facebook, TikTok, Instagram… and the infinite scroll syndrome
Social networks have all a feature of discovering content with infinite scrolling. I’ve noticed that it produces more and more addiction, because of FOMO and dopamine shots for your brain.
A few years ago, Facebook focused on friends and daily news about them. But it’s an old story.
The first thing is that more advertising is inserted between your feed posts. No one cares about them, our brains have developed the capacity to ignore ads. It’s a noise source.
The worst is that because of your likes, interests, and friends circles, ads are very, very accurate. On Instagram, how often have you been shocked by ads' accuracy and products proposed to you?
Secondly, the subscribing feature, which has been introduced and enabled by default a few years ago. It displays too many posts: posts liked or commented on by your friend or any Facebook group or similar Instagram account. Even if they don’t mention you.
So my friend Nicolas comments a post with a silly cat video, tagging another friend that I don’t know. And his post is right here. It’s not for me, but it’s f**king RIGHT HERE. It will be fine if it will not, seriously.
Consequently, each day, you have a big feed. And it gives you the feeling of missing reading the news. So you keep opening and using Facebook or Instagram with more extended sessions than ever before.
I remembered a few years ago, Facebook was not like today. It was excellent. Facebook was focusing on friends and daily news about them. But it’s an old story. Now, Facebook aggregates news, buzz videos, cooking video, political videos by creating social bubbles, etc. More than ever before.
It’s not just about your friends anymore. It’s about the entire Internet in one place. And a lot of traffic, ads, and money for Meta. Not especially for you if you are not a player on it.
So I put here some tips to avoid addiction and infinite scrolling syndrome:
- Sort and unsubscribe your “liked” pages/groups: only keep the ones that you care about.
- Unsubscribe friends who are over-connected and sharing a lot on Facebook. We all have this one guy liking everything and everywhere. He pollutes your feed.
- Configure your feed to see the top 30 friends in priority:
Share your real life in a real place, not all your life in a virtual space.
Yes, you can fill the importance of following your friends every day, make jokes, share your trips, like their posts, see their trips, etc. But stop panicking about forgetting something of them. Go to the bar and enjoy a genuinely sharing moment with your friends. Speak, smile, ask, laugh, be real friends: share your real life in a real place, not all your life in a virtual area.
News & RSS feed: start to select what you care about and delete everything else
One year ago, RSS feed was like a disease in my life. Perhaps it’s the same to you, with an RSS board or whatever. For this post, I decided to reopen it on Feedly.
I remember that I’ve already removed 10 items of them before, but there is still a significant list. Here the “WTF” list:
As described below, I’ve 50/50 work VS additional news subscriptions. The additional news represents no value to me. The problem was 50% part of non-work subscriptions represents 70%-80% of news to read.
To this mess, remember that I had all notifications enabled on my iPhone 🙄.
I remember that I was like a bot, scrolling, repeatedly, wanting to see and complete reading all the news, and shutting down the badge counter to zero. Seriously, silly I was… I loosed my time and my energy for less than 50% value. What’s the point? Did you see you here? Change that.
Don’t panic not to be the first.
So one day, I decided to stop this mess, step by step:
- 1: Remove RSS subscriptions.
- 2: Finally, remove my RSS feed and RSS app.
- 3: Gradually focus on Medium stories with weekly digest only.
- 4: Limit apps on my iPhone.
- 5: Select my mail inbox subscriptions (next part of this series).
How about now? How do I do? Here are my tips:
- I have my weekly digest enabled on Medium, I focus on following 100 people max and follow 10 publications max. Why Medium? I think it’s an excellent platform for writers with excellent posts. I’m not saying that it’s always about quality. I noticed regular satisfaction with posts I read. I also saw that Medium posts aggregated third-party news, via links, that I could learn via an RSS feed. My Medium app have notifications disabled because I receive the weekly digest and I don’t have to respond to comments or see new posts immediately.
- I have one favorite breaking news app on my iPhone, but notifications are disabled. News apps are only good if you configure them properly. They will interrupt you with information and spamming. And seriously, what is the amount of positive news in this world? What about significant news? You will hear the story soon, with your friend or because a friend who knows your interest will send it to you. Don’t panic about not being the first. Ask yourself: is this will help you?
That’s all.
And that’s fine. I’m alive.
All the other news I received, I knew them by discussing it with friends, family, or colleagues. It indirectly improves real social sharing by simply more conversations with people you care about.
If you consume a lot alone, perhaps you will share less with them in real life with others. Think about it.
Twitter: limit your subscriptions
Twitter is good for quickly diffusing news (and fake ones) in a short message. Twitter is a big source of FOMO.
News that will interest you, will also interest your network. You have interests in common. So it will be on your Twitter feed sooner or later.
My first tip is to limit my subscriptions to 100 people max. Not more, it’s useless. Otherwise, like Facebook, it will “aspire” you to the dark side of infinite scrolling… and have endless time wasted.
I disabled notifications and put the Twitter app in the “Forbidden folder”, the same for Instagram and Facebook apps.
The second tip I’ve just applied recently is to stop using Twitter every day. I disabled notifications and put the Twitter app in the “Forbidden folder”, the same for Instagram and Facebook apps.
The mail inbox: the evil of everyone
I ask this sometimes to my entourage: “show me your mail inbox”.
And there it is:
Here is mine right now:
It’s, of course, not empty. Here is the content:
Pretty cool, huh? I have not removed some of them because some are very important, or because I have to read them in detail very soon. So I keep them in front of my eyes to see them regularly and deal with them more quickly / not forget them (like coupon/reductions).
Seriously, if the badge counter doesn’t go down, how can you be able to stop consulting it or be sure that a new mail that you received is an important one to you? The temptation and doubt will be there every day.
Some people tell me they are used to seeing this counter growing repeatedly, and they don’t care. Consequently:
- They just search and open the one they care about by opening and scrolling through the list of unread emails. I’m not sure about the effectiveness of this behavior.
- Storage of useless emails is a waste, with many CO2 emissions. Let’s have a light mailbox and contribute to a happier planet. “In the grand scheme of things, the impact of email is not the biggest carbon problem humanity faces, but it is an easy one to tackle.”
“Just you have to do is to unsubscribe.”
Moreover, you are not going to read all this spam or newsletters. Unsubscribe to them. It’s simple. Just you have to do, starting today, is to unsubscribe.
The tip is, when you receive a newsletter, make sure you are usually reading it. If not, scroll to the bottom, and tap on the small “unsubscribe” or “click here” link. It takes an average of 5 seconds per mail to do it. With a daily routine for two months, you will retrieve a perfect mail inbox: with just what you want and care about.
To help you, imagine that your email inbox is your letters box. How many times before it will be full?
Last words: subscribe or use apps only if it brings you value
Remember this:
- The fewer you have subscriptions, the fewer you have interruptions.
- The fewer you have interruptions, the more you have focus time.
And that:
- Subscriptions will give you FOMO.
- Notifications will give you temptations.
So, take a long moment on your smartphone to configure or disable your notifications, configure your social app feed options, unsubscribe from people on Twitter, and delete useless apps that re-engage you uselessly. Do it regularly for a month and compare your time (in iOS, there is an excellent time analysis).
Subscribe only if it brings you a high value to yourself. You will see the results quickly, you will care about people and things that bring you more value for you.
Now that we have more time, it’s time to have more space in our brains. And with more space, you can add, start and achieve new challenges more effectively.
I hope you have learned some new tips and are conscious of your addictions. Now go to the next part: “Part II - The mental charge and getting things done”!
If you are still here: thank you 🍻.
