Hi all,
I've just posted my current approach to uncluttering my online life and getting a bit more focused in the stuff I really care about. Comments, opinions, extra suggestions?
http://www.lucasr.org/2010/05/09/uncluttering/
Cheers!
Overall Rating: 1 vote
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Posted 2 years ago #
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i'm the one who went cold turkey on facebook and twitter.
best thing i ever did.
i don't miss either of them...in retrospect they really were a load of waffle.
they created a lot of noise and motion but didn't really provide all that much fabulous content, when it got down to the nitty gritty.
in the 17 months since i turned off both accounts, i have renovated, decluttered, travelled heaps, and generally finished a lot of work.
and still had time to establish a daily meditation practice and spend a lot of time just pondering.i get notifications from four or five places and i am considering cutting back on three....or four....of those too.
as far as the inbox goes, less less less is my mantra there.
if you don't invite it in in the first place, then you eliminate the next step: dealing with it!Posted 2 years ago # -
@lucasr, I read your blog and left a comment. I have taken some of your suggestions and will implement them, particularly the one about no longer auto archiving. I am good about reviewing what I've saved in my email, usually do this twice a year because I will save emails that pertain to specific projects and then delete the many emails later that I no longer need.
I have avoided twitter and facebook regardless of the many invites I receive to join and become someone's "friend." I am not interested in the minutia of others' lives! I've got my own!
Last year I began to unsubscribe to e-newsletters and only keep the ones I know will have interesting articles or pertain to what I do...like unclutterer since I am a professional organizer.
Thanks for the ideas!
Posted 2 years ago # -
I am a facebooker as I am so lax at keeping in touch with friends, and this means I keep contact. Plus a lot of my old school and uni friends now have smnall chicldren and this is the only way I get to see them. Never been tempted by twitter though.
Posted 2 years ago # -
I'd really like to ditch all of it, including the cell phone, because I am addicted to devices, email, Facebook, MySpace, and Huffington Post. I don't need any of this constant checking. I thought I was being virtuous by refusing to Twitter (tweet?) but there are still a lot of online time wasters cluttering up my life. My biggest fear is that I will miss getting a gig (I am a musician) if I don't look under every virtual rock. Actually, anyone who would get me a gig has my phone number and would call me if I didn't respond to an email. Of course, that means I still need the cell phone, because if I don't check my messages 3 times a day I might miss out and someone else will get the gig. It's a real problem. I hate all of it, but I can't stop myself. My MySpace page led indirectly to some gigs in Paris 2 1/2 years ago, so ever since I have been checking, checking in hopes of hitting the jackpot again. One way to kick the habit would be to go somewhere with no cell towers or internet. Maybe that's what I'll do!
Posted 2 years ago # -
I have no problems with my Facebook and Twitter, I have Tweetdeck so I don't spend much time on them just check the updates every hour or so. The biggest thing for me was to just hide all of the "friends" I had on facebook that I didn't really care about hearing from and being very brutal about unfollowing people on Twitter. Also, I'm not sure how people complain about spending so much time on social networking sites, learn to control yourself.
As for a feed reader, Google Reader saves me SOOO much time. I used to spend a really long time going to all of the websites I want to read from. But now I can just quickly skim the titles of the articles in Google Reader pick the ones I want and move on. I find that is probably takes me 1/5 the time to read the same amount of stuff.
Posted 2 years ago # -
Well, I have to retract what I said in my last post. Today I received an email from a woman who wanted to hire me to play at a graduation party. She was referred by a friend. I guess I am doomed to check email and networking sites for the rest of my life. There isn't a lot of work around for musicians, so I don't have a choice. :-(
I think I will hide people on Facebook who are not really "friends." Good suggestion. That will narrow things down to about 20 people. The irony is that as a mode of communication for anything important, FB sucks. I announced that my BF was in the hospital recovering from surgery and no one read it. So much for the information age.Posted 2 years ago # -
I've been working on this lately too. I'd gotten pretty caught up on online nonlife. Part of it was due to my last job, where I had very little to do, so I used Facebook games as a way to make the day pass. When I changed jobs, I quit all the games cold turkey. Lately I've done the following:
-hide people on Facebook I don't care about.
-unsubscribe from people on Twitter I don't care about.
-unsubscribe from several blogs via my RSS reader that, while interesting, don't truly enrich my life.
-unsubscribe from yahoo groups I don't really learn from anymore.I keep people on Facebook because I'm an aspiring author, and I have connections to other writers and small publishing companies around the country, and while these are real friends, I want to keep the connection there. I'm not sure if it will ever help me, but I figure if I hide them, it doesn't take time away from me.
I agree with Kamikazee about the RSS reader. It saves a lot of time (now that I've unsubscribed from blogs that aren't worthwhile to me.) Mostly I have self-improvement blogs and writing blogs, with a few musicians I adore, and a handful of other miscellaneous stuff. I scan the headlines and only read what interests me. Extremely useful, and I don't see myself ever doing away with it completely.
I also have a second Twitter account I started over the weekend. I use it to post things that make me happy or that I'm thankful for. (2nd account so I don't inundate my friends with stuff they probably don't care about.) It's my way of, well, being more thankful for the things in my life. Because of my iPhone, Twitter is the easiest way for me to do this, rather than a notebook, because I always have my phone with me. This way I have 1 place I can go back and look at the good things in my life whenever I get down.
Posted 2 years ago # -
I deleted Facebook (not just "deactivated" the account, but officially deleted it) a few months ago. I missed it once or twice, but got over it quickly. It feels like such a weight has been lifted from my shoulders now that it is gone and I really don't see myself ever going back!
I use Twitter just to follow a few of my favorite bands. I check it once or twice a day from my iPod.
It's amazing how we all end up feeling relieved when these things are out of our lives!
Posted 2 years ago # -
I don't think that anyone should feel guilty about spending a modest amount of time online. If it might help you in your career, that's great, if it's a form of entertainment, that's good too. To me, it isn't a problem unless it is preventing you from living your life.
Has anyone spent too much time on StumbleUpon? There's a few weekends out of my life, and scores of bookmarks in my read file that I am trying to weed through.
Posted 2 years ago # -
I like Facebook - I haven't blocked "friends" yet, but I've found that you can hide applications (click on the upper-right corner of the post) - very helpful when dozens of friends are addicted to MafiaWars, the farm apps, etc. I only check once a day and even then just skim through, skipping over the non-personal posts.
I have a Twitter account but I don't monitor it. I can't access at work anyway, and the main reason I got it was because sometimes you can get extra entries into online contests if you tweet about it (to spread the word). I haven't found a good way to read tweets from others - reading from Twitter.com seems too unwieldy.
I need to do some serious trimming of my email newsletters. I literally have thousands of unread emails, but even determining which newsletters you should unsubscribe to takes time, and I just haven't done it yet. Meanwhile my email folders just keep getting bigger (I do use filters so they're grouped together).
As for websites and blogs, each day I check a dozen websites. I have them in a special bookmark folder which I go to, right click and say Open All in Tabs (Firefox). No need to go back to the list to open each site individually.
I do have a problem with bookmarking some sites that I never go back to - I'm trying to designate an hour or so a month to check out some each time to see if they are worth keeping. For sites that I only want to visit *once* more, I like the Firefox add-on Read It Later (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/7661). I believe it's available for other applications too. Keeps my main bookmarks clean(er).
I love RSS feeds. I use a Firefox add-on called Brief (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4578/). It shows a list of all my Live Bookmarks (feeds) in a sidebar. I even have my feeds in separate folders (as long as they are under the Live Bookmarks main folder) so I can have crafts, food, news, etc group together - and read them according to what I feel like at the time. It shows me a count on the bottom toolbar (optional) of how many posts I have left to read, and can clean up old posts after a certain number of days (e.g. 30).
Posted 2 years ago # -
My point about not using feed readers is pretty about reducing the amount of content I consume everyday and focusing on the stuff I really care. In other words: I don't want to waste time on feeds/websites that have uninteresting content most of the time. You end up just looking at a list titles and marking everything as read. I prefer to focus on the fewer websites that are consistently relevant to me. And I don't even feel like I'm missing anything by doing that. Even after removing all the irrelevant stuff, I still track a lot of content anyway - 30 websites might sound like a small number in internet terms but, in practice, it's a lot of content to read.
I'm not saying that feed readers are bad tools or anything. They obviously make reading content from multiple websites much easier. That's their main reason to exist. The problem is that they make you feel like you are able to consume much more content that you actually can/should (it's so simple to add just one more feed and keep it there...). And you end up wasting time on things that don't really matter. That's my case at least.
Posted 2 years ago # -
i think i see what you mean, lucasr.
personally, i didn't want to read more stuff online, more efficiently.
i just wanted less stuff to read online.
sometimes it means that i don't know what's going on.
but who really does know what's going on, anyway? lol!Posted 2 years ago # -
This is what I am currently doing! It’s amazing how long it takes to unclutter the online life…
I spent an hour or so yesterday cleaning up my facebook page, blocking applications, and removing "friends" I don't wish to have on my page. I downsized that to about 40 people who I’d actually like to keep contact with, and it’s amazing at how fast I can zip through the messages and updates and be done with it all now. It may sound kinda harsh, but I really don’t care about my school friend of 10 years ago who I haven’t spoken a word to since.
I also decided to back out of all the role-play games I’ve been involved in. Those things are never ending and I just don’t want to do it anymore. I’ve cleared out my photobucket account, am planning to delete two of my four e-mails, unsubscribed to many newsletters and cleared out many favorites.
The only thing I’m stuck on is Flickr. I’m not sure what to do with that yet. D:
Posted 2 years ago # -
I forgot to mention this about managing feeds. It seems some sites go in cycles where they have relevant info and then nothing for months. Every few months I go and rename "questionable" feeds (I'm just renaming the bookmark) with three underscores in the front (___bookmark/feed name). Each time I find something relevant, I rename again removing one underscore. I can do this right in Brief. At the end of the month (or two), if it's still has two or three underscores, I will probably unsubscribe. One underscore is up to my discretion.
Posted 2 years ago #
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