The great unfollowing 😱

Saturday, December 18, 2021

Inspired by @cedevroe’s semi-regular purges, I’ve gone through my many services and unfollowed, unsubscribed, and deleted everything. And, I mean everything! That’s all of my RSS feeds, newsletters, podcasts, and Micro.blog, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube accounts. This seemed kind of crazy at first, until I realized that being so attached to these things is rather silly.

Before simply resubscribing to everything, I’m trying to take a more thoughtful approach to why I’m using each of these services.

All of my news feeds are in NetNewsWire with Feedbin as the back end. I’d accumulated a few dozen feeds here, the vast majority of which I was consistently just marking all as read. Many were feeds that I thought I should read, rather than actually wanted to read. I’m going to resubscribe to just the ones that seemed to consistently yield interesting (to me) articles, like Quanta Magazine and Aeon.

As newsletters arrive, I’ll unsubscribe from them. If I still see value, I’ll transition them over to Feebin and they’ll show up among the news feeds. Conceptually this makes sense to me, since they really are just another source of news, rather than actual correspondence to me.

Although I cleaned up my podcasts a couple of years ago, I’d added a few more since then. I think my original list is still the right one. Nevertheless, I’ve unsubscribed from them all and will reintroduce them slowly.

The YouTube algorithms are far too powerful and tempting. So, I’m shifting to adding specific channels to Feedbin. I like a few science and math oriented channels (such as Steve Mould, 3Blue1Brown, and Stand-up Maths), the rest were just mindless ways of passing the time.

Instagram used to be where I went to see pictures from friends about their adventures, kids, and pets. Over time my feed had become dominated by brands, especially fitness, beer, and whiskey. Nothing wrong with any of these, obviously, just not what I need to be seeing, So, back to just accounts for people I actually know. As an aside, I was surprised by how easy Instagram makes it to unfollow, including a helpful list of which accounts you interact with the most and the least.

I really like the idea of Twitter as a place to follow my interests. We all know that in practice it can be a pretty nasty place. As an experiment, I’m going to try only following topics there, rather than people. To be honest, though, I lost my Twitter scrolling habit about halfway through the Trump presidency and I’m not that tempted to return.

Micro.blog was tricky. As the opposite of Twitter, I’ve found lots of nice people having interesting conversations there on a wide array of topics. But, the point of this exercise is to clean out everything, so even here I’ve stopped following everyone. I suspect that I’ll end up mostly back where I started on this one.

I have to admit feeling a bit disoriented this morning. My usual routine is to scan through all of these sources while waking up with some coffee. There are lots of other things I can be doing in the morning though, starting with actually reading some of the articles I’ve accumulated in my ever lengthening read-it-later queue.

Although a purge like this can seem dramatic, I think it can also be therapeutic. Thanks to @cedevroe for prompting this.

2021 iPhone Home Screens

Saturday, November 20, 2021

My iPhone Home Screen continues to evolve and, now that we have Focus Modes, I’ve made some further adjustments.

From left to right, I’m using three different Focus Modes: Personal, Work, and Fitness. The first two are entirely widget focused, while Fitness has a few app icons as well.

The dock has Drafts which, as the tagline says, is where text starts. This hasn’t changed from my earlier setups. The second icon launches a front-end Shortcut for Apple Notes. As I described in my Apple Note overview, this is an idea that I’ve borrowed from Matthew Cassinelli and provides a flexible interface to the app.

Personal

From top left, my Personal Home Screen starts with a stack of Reminders filtered to my Personal list, Fantastical, and Streaks. This is essentially my “what should I be doing” stack.

Next is a stack with Photos and Siri Suggestions. The Photos widget consistently surfaces delightful photos, so I’ve given it a prominent spot. While the usefulness of Siri Suggestions are variable, I like the idea of my phone learning my habits and showing me relevant actions.

Through the middle, I have Weather on the left and the right is a stack of Apple Music and Overcast, which are my options for listening to something.

On the bottom left is a stack of Timery and Screen Time. These are there to keep me mindful of what I’m actually doing, especially on weekends. The Timery widget shows me a summary view of my projects. So, in this screenshot I’ve put in an hour on exercise, another hour on reading, and 20 minutes with some household chores. The Screen Time widget helps keep me honest about how much I’m using my devices, especially on weekends when I really should be looking at something besides a screen.

And on the bottom right is a stack of Day One and Notes, filtered to my Personal folder. Day One is there for capturing family events and reflections. While the Notes folder often has some useful reference material for our weekend activities.

Work

Curiously, my Work Home Screen is less complicated than my Personal one.

The top is a stack with Fantastical and Mail’s VIP widget. I’m not entirely convinced that the Mail widget is useful here. I almost always just want Fantastical reminding me of my next meeting or task.

Given the more variable number of tasks I tend to be doing while in work mode, I’ve got the Siri Suggestions widget in the middle. I took this screenshot on the weekend, so it isn’t indicative of what it usually shows, which tends to be one of the Shortcuts that I’m often launching to manage my workday.

Intentionally mirroring my Personal HomeScreen, the bottom row is a stack with two Timery widgets and a stack of two Notes widgets, one filtered to my Work folder and the other to my Meetings folder.

Fitness

The Fitness Home Screen is mostly an experiment. I spend the vast majority of my time in one of the other two Focus Modes, so I’m not yet convinced that I need any other Home Screens.

Regardless, this one has the Fitness widget at the top for seemingly obvious reasons.

The middle row has the Training Today widget to help keep me honest about rest. And then a cluster of icons on the right. The only one that is non-standard is “Workout mix”, which is just a Shortcut to launch a good playlist in Apple Music.

The bottom row has Carrot Weather to make sure I’m not about to get rained on when heading out for a run. I’ve also added the Batteries widget there to make sure my Apple Watch and AirPods are ready for action.

I’ve set up Personal Automations to automatically switch between my Personal and Work Home Screens at 8:45 and 17:30. I’ve found these good reminders to keep my work activities within reasonable office hours. Starting a Workout automatically switches to the Fitness Home Screen.

There’s almost endless scope for fiddling with these. So, by writing them here, I’m adding some accountability to just stop that and use them for a while before making further changes.