2017 NY Resolution success: Simplifying my digital life

Exercise more, eat healthier, watch less TV… everyone’s new year resolution is similar, with the same ultimate goal of being happier. Mine was simpler previous year: just to simplify my digital life, which did not seem easy as I am working as a System Administrator for academic institution, but along the way I have adapted it and fixed a lot of smaller things. Maybe some ideas may apply to you. I wrote it in sections so paragraphs are skippable.

Use smartphone only when absolutely necessary.

Problem: I was like most people, checking mail, social media and news in the bed as the first thing in the morning, and as the last thing before falling asleep; also while waiting in a line, commuting to/from work, eating, and even in the bathroom. The 99% of my free time was curated by somebody else. Interesting things were saved to Pocket, or Keep, or otherwise bookmarked for later. I became a information sorting machine. I have realized that 10 minutes after browsing my phone I wouldn’t remember anything useful, and as it didn’t affect my life in any positive way, I might get rid of the habit.

Improvement 1: No phone in bed. By not using the phone in the morning helped me remember the old days before the smartphones: laying in bed for an hour on weekend, just thinking about 100 random things, there is nothing on the web that would make me that happy. This habit also helped me get up easier during the weekday.

Without getting any new information before bedtime helped me fall asleep easier, especially as I didn’t get frustrated after reading news and comments. Evening showers became my transition from external to internal life.

Improvement 2: No phone while eating. “Don’t play with your food!”; Actually, “don’t play with your phone, do play with your food”. Chop a tiny piece of a bread crust or something else, and touch the tip of your tongue with it… notice sweet flavor and the way it melts. It is a complete new-old feeling that a phone cannot give you. All the food has a taste and texture, which most of us forgot about. This is something we miss out on when being occupied browsing on the phone. Eat slowly and enjoy every bite. This way the body will not miss out on Leptin hormone which signals when we are full — Otherwise the article might be a bit bigger then the stomach. How to do it? Make a habit to turn on WiFi after the breakfast, and before evening shower.

Improvement 3: No interruptions on the go. Turn 4G LTE off. I switched to Google Fi cell provider, and I pay $10/GB of data, which means that watching a YouTube video in HD would cost me about a dollar to watch. This is hardly worth it so I keep it off. This has resulted in my monthly phone bill being only about $30 with taxes, which is extremely low for USA standards. In addition, I don’t get notifications or other interruptions - outdoors is beautiful and everything can wait at least until I am in front of a much bigger screen, and my eyes are also grateful.

Improvement 3: ‎No news. It started with election and negative conditional reflex linked to it. I have even stopped following tech blogs and sites. This one was hard thing to give up, but I have realized that most stories are written to provoke reactions and get more ad views. Everything is either speculation, sensationalist news, or journalists giving advice to the biggest tech companies. That amounted to 30 minutes saved every day. My replacement became scanning the first 2 pages on Reddit, as usually the title contains the gist of the news, and clickbaits are downvoted by community and rarely get on the first page, so you get tl;dr on everything in just a few minutes. Even after a year of this I think I am as up-to-date as I was last year without as much time wasted.

Not everything there was positive, as I have missed on the whole Bitcoin/Altcoin boom and chance to make big profits.

Improvement 4: ‎Social Media - Spending less time on it. This one actually started after I have realized that Facebook was leaking memory on the phone, and if I opened it even once after a phone restart, the phone would get a bit slower every hour making it useless by the evening (this is probably fixed by now). So I have uninstalled all social network apps, but I can still access them through Chrome or other web browser on the phone.

Solution for Facebook — Unlike and unfollow all Facebook pages, brands, TV shows, bands and celebrities… everything except friends. If you have ever tried to buy ads on Facebook you could have noticed that Facebook uses people’s likes to target the ads exactly to their preference, so they would click more. If you don’t like any pages, don’t specify your age and gender, then you don’t fit into any Facebook ad targeting category and your feed is cleaner. By having only friends and not pages, you only see your friends’ posts. Now, in my daily feed all I see only about 15 posts per day from people I actually know, and within two minutes I can already scroll to the posts from yesterday, and know I am done for the day. This way I don’t miss out on anything that is actually important — people.

Solution for Twitter — there is a Muted Words option where you can add certain names, topics and words that will never be shown. This shrinks your bubble, but in the age of trolls, bots, and “influencers” it is not such a bad thing. Now I am less bitter after Twitter.

Fixing Email habits

Problem: I have many email accounts: several private ones, work, private business, spam, developer, program support… and it was taking a lot of my time and affecting my productivity throughout the day with constant interruptions.

Attempt to fix: “Inbox zero”. I was never able to achieve “Inbox 0” before, and I thought that it would bring me some relief and joy. How I did it (technical): As most my email was collected and forwarded from multiple email accounts into a single Gmail account, it was not possible to go through thousands of emails directly in Gmail, one-by-one, or to sort them in Gmail. So, as a solution, I have installed Microsoft Outlook and let 10+GB of my Gmail account be synchronized to my local computer. It took several hours. From there it was easy: Email view was sorted by Sender and filtered to show only Unread messages. This way I was able to grab 50 email from a single sender, unsubscribe from it, and delete the whole group at once. It was going fast. But there was also FOMO — “Fear of Missing Out” so I was reading through some mail and adding links to Pocket for reading later. This was a mistake. Even with this optimization, it took me several days, but in the end I was left with only 30 email I was going to respond to. Already feeling a bit better. Outlook synchronizes directly with Gmail, so anything I did in Outlook was immediately reflected in regular Gmail. I stopped using Outlook since.

Improvement 1: Splitting email accounts. I had several accounts forwarding to my primary Gmail, so even after unsubscribing from a lot of services, I would still get several emails every hour, and it was still taking a lot of time to scan through everything. Inbox Zero was unsustainable. I decided to stop forwarding all emails from other accoutnts. Only a few people have my primary mail, while the rest have secondary or tertiary, depending on how likely they are to get hacked, or include me into a chain email and “accidentally” share my email with other people or spammers. I added only the primary email account on my phone. All other mail accounts I would check once in a day or two from a PC, and each account was connected to different Google Chrome profile, so it was easy to check them without typing passwords. But the system is not perfect. Once a day turned into once a week and I would forget about some email accounts for even a month. I didn’t have the FOMO until a few months later when I have actually missed on some really cool personal invitations and events.

Improvement 2: Everything can wait. If something is urgent, you will not find about it over the email. If you get an email notification on a phone, the choice is either to respond from the phone, or to mark it Unread so you will see it once you are on the desktop. If you decide do to it later, then you might keep subconsciously thinking about it the rest of the day. Since I have decided to use phone only when absolutely necessary, replying to emails on a tiny keyboard didn’t qualify as necessary, so there was also no need to read emails on the phone if I was not going to reply. Turning off sound notifications for emails was helpful to remove the temptation.

Stop compulsive data hording.

Most of us compulsively hoard things, and this new age this has been transferred to hoarding any useful data, such as articles, videos, music, pictures, inspiration, snippets, etc. Every day I would add more new articles to Pocket than I would read already saved ones, so now after a few years of doing that, I have thousands of articles on the Pocket that I “want” to read. The same is for Instapaper, in Google Keep, OneNote, hundreds of YouTube videos in “Watch Later”, hundreds of Quora answers and Ted talks, thousands of bookmarks for Chrome, Firefox and even Edge. Now I know I will never read it or watch it. My interests change, news become irrelevant, research gets updated, so if I see something interesting today, there are only two choices: Read now or never; because “Later” is same as ”Never”.

These are just some of tech related changes I made and habits I have managed to keep. I feel less burdened, there are less things on my mind, and I am just a bit happier, so the 2017 was a personal success.

Have a successful 2018!

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