Help Me Scale Back My Digital Life - Part 2 - (3 Years Later)

May 13, 2009 6:01 PM

Help Me Scale Back My Digital Life - Part 2 - (3 years later). Three years ago I asked how to scale back my digital life and got some great answers. But, three years is an eternity in tech time. I'm not so sure I'm any better with all this than I was way back then. Now we have Twitter, Facebook, Voicemail-to-text, text messaging, online storage, blogs, RSS, online this and online that. Has it all helped us become better organized? Or, has it made us become more deluged with choices to where we are more scatterbrained that ever? So, from 2006 to 2009, with all the new toys (for better or worse) - again - how would you help me scale back my digital life?
posted by Gerard Sorme to society & culture (18 comments total)

RSS is good for watching things for intermittent updates, and a system that lets you watch and ignore things floating by will be far less a time burden than one that presents your feeds as an inbox you need to read through. (Some people seem to like using Twitter for this purpose, but I never got into it.)

Also, people who blog about new ways to be more productive and more organized (and, particularly, to "hack" your "life") are generally trying to convert your anxiety about information overload into advertising dollars.
posted by silentbicycle at 6:17 PM on May 13 [2 favorites has favorites]

You favorited an answer last time 3 years ago that is timeless. Turn the darn thing off was the essence of the answer. Hasn't changed. Check emails once a day. Set specific times for surfing or reading and turn it off. Read a book. Exercise. Write letters to friends. Go for a walk with a friend. take up a hobby. Etc. Any other advice will be to organize your digital life, not scale it back.
posted by JohnnyGunn at 6:23 PM on May 13 [2 favorites has favorites]

I've heard the meme that "information overload" isn't real, etc. etc. I don't buy it for a minute. I think it's very real. In fact, it's why I'm revisiting this topic. We have vastly more web 2.0 products than we had back in '06. Online calendars, evernote, drop.io, dropbox, Google products, ZoHo products, shared storage (which is becoming huge), online phone forwarding, Twitter followers, Facebook friends, there's just so much. I try to organize with "this" system only to be wowed over (usually from some new Lifehacker review) to "that" system. It's an embarrassment of riches for those who work on the web and find themselves overloaded with choices. I have found I'm no more organized, no more efficient - and constantly experimenting with new products from some new start-up or whatever. I feel....well.....swarmed under by the digitalness (new word?) of life in 2009.

JohnnyGunn, There's some truth to what you say, except that "scaling back" and "organizing to work more proficiently" pretty much go together for me. Maybe the answer is back-to-analog with some things. But turning off (which is my advice to so many) is only good if you want away from work, away from what the digital world provides. I'm thinking more of streamlining while I am on. Otherwise, I would agree with you 100%.
posted by Gerard Sorme at 6:34 PM on May 13

I have found I'm no more organized, no more efficient - and constantly experimenting with new products from some new start-up or whatever.

really, what you're doing is procrastinating from doing work by organizing data. i know, i used to do it too, and trust me i'm a world class procrastinator. the solution is to pick a tool that works for a task and STICK WITH IT. if gcal meets your needs, then stop wasting time looking at other calendars. just because something is new and shiny doesn't mean it's actually better for you. the philosophy behind last year's model doesn't just apply to gadgets.
posted by lia at 6:52 PM on May 13 [1 favorite has favorites]

. I try to organize with "this" system only to be wowed over (usually from some new Lifehacker review) to "that" system. It's an embarrassment of riches for those who work on the web and find themselves overloaded with choices.

You don't actually have to master all the new information or try all the new applications unless that's specifically part of your job. All that does is distract you. Try being satisfied with the functionality of the suite you're now using. Don't add any new toys unless they go mainstream enough for you to notice. Be a late adopter. Don't feel like you have to know each and every one. Let go of the pressure you're putting on yourself to optimize. Use a few applications well, and refuse to integrate any more unless they have a strong, demonstrated utility that improves your life.

I realize this isn't what you're asking, but you seem to be in a place where you're so interested in/fascinated with the new applications that you want to play with them, and yet you don't like the confusion and chaos and constant self questioning ("do I have the best configuration of online tools? Do I now? How about now?") that this causes. The solution is to stop going to either extreme.

Either: Don't bother yourself about the latest new gadget that's going to revolutionize your [calendar/listening/communications/photosharing/whatever]. Just forget it - you have Flickr, you like it, awesome. Same for your other current tools. Unless and until someone whose opinion you trust can show you that a new application is really awesome and you really should get on it, don't bother learning about the news ones. In most careers, it's totally unecessary to keep up with each and every tiny wrinkle in this silly world. And everyone uses a different portfolio anyway.

Or: accept that you are fascinated with and like the new toys, and/or that your career somehow depends upon your checking them all out, and stop berating yourself for spending time exploring them.

There are more choices than ever, but the problem is not going to go away. Hint: it's also not going to be solved by a new product. Think of the grocery store analogy. Grocery stores are now 4-5x larger than they were in the 1960s. They contain many tens of thousands more products than they did in the 1960s. Are they better? Better for us? Is the food of better quality? No, no, and no. They offer more choices, but not much differentiantion between choices. Most of the new choices are not a significant improvement over old choices and in many cases are less good for you or good tasting. And if we consume only the newest products, we will consume very little actual....food. Faced with this situation, my strategy in the grocery store is to pretty much limit my interest to those sections that sell food - you know, meat, dairy, produce, grains - and avoid those that exist to sell new products. My shopping is more pleasurable, my life simpler, my diet healthier. This is pretty much the strategy I've adopted in the face of the online choices as well. I'm happy to dot he really useful, well-developed, common applications. I walk right by most of the others until they begin to prove themselves essential. Many of them I check out and then find not that useful after all (Mint, TaDaLists). So, be choosy.

Just because choices are offered to you, you don't have to take them. Stop feeling overwhelmed: just refuse new products. Your time is the only thing you can't replace or substitute.Value your time and your clarity of mind most of all.
posted by Miko at 6:58 PM on May 13 [1 favorite has favorites]

But turning off (which is my advice to so many) is only good if you want away from work, away from what the digital world provides

I am not sure about this. I know it makes intuitive sense. But I think that exercising more choice and control at the level of "when you're on or not on" does actually feed through onto the level of how you organize online. Hard to explain, but... it's as if you are strengthening a muscle that is responsible for "gatekeeping" what you let in to your field of attention. Which is just as crucial when you're "on", as it is for giving you the willpower to not be "on" all the time. Moreover, I've found, this prompts a kind of perspectival shift and changes the focus of your "life-streamlining" - it reduces the degree to which you need to feel streamlined and structured and organized online, because you're streamlined and structured and organized at a more fundamental level. Jeez, I hope that even half makes sense.
posted by game warden to the events rhino at 7:04 PM on May 13 [1 favorite has favorites]

to follow up on game warden: one of the best habits I've developed in the last few months is to leave my email program off. Checking email first thing in the morning immediately derails the entire day. Usually I know the priorities for the first few hours of work and can just get going on them will full, fresh concentration. I open email and check it before lunch, and again in late afternoon. That's it. I would have thought this would somehow ruin my workflow and piss people off, but it doesn't. Think about it - most people are happy to get less email from you. You stay in charge of your schedule, instead of ceding control to the constant distracting 'ping' of someone wanting to bend your ear. And if it's really important, they'll call.
posted by Miko at 7:12 PM on May 13

Some good thoughts here. Obviously, I know this is of my own making, but the desire to somehow scale back by finding "the" tool (that will do the work of three) is almost an obsessive lust-like search. Hence, I suppose, the popularity of all the "hacking" productivity blogs that silentbicycle mentioned. I think for many of us, the discovery that there's a new "latest and greatest" just demands, in a compulsive way, to be checked out in case we're "missing something." Yet, I know, the grass is always greener somewhere else and it always will be. Like I mentioned before - maybe going back to analog and the use of paper and pen for more tasks would stop the chase. Of course, then the debate begins about whether Moleskine is the second coming of notebooks or the G-2 pen is the pen to end all pens. Oh how we love to piddle so as to improve our productivity and stop our piddling!

Game warden: It took me reading the post twice, but actually it makes perfect sense. And Miko, you make a very good point about email. Less IS better.
posted by Gerard Sorme at 7:25 PM on May 13

Of course, then the debate begins about whether Moleskine is the second coming of notebooks or the G-2 pen is the pen to end all pens

So the problem really isn't technology, it's your somewhat obsessive quest for perfectability. Address that, and I bet your technology problem disappears.
posted by Miko at 7:30 PM on May 13

That would be true, Miko, if I had been talking about myself. Actually, the Moleskine versus eighty-nine cent notebook and G-2 versus Bic pen is nothing I'm interested in, I was just making fun of the silly drama you find in even the most simple of things. Though, you make a good point about the whole theme of perfectionism - it's pervasive and frightening. I'm certainly not immune to feeling pressured at times with what I, usually in hindsight, will recognize as perfectionism.
posted by Gerard Sorme at 7:56 PM on May 13

Hence, I suppose, the popularity of all the "hacking" productivity blogs that silentbicycle mentioned.

dude, stop reading them! speaking from experience—i used to write for gizmodo and read a few hundred gadget-related sites, every single day, for work—the longer you go without finding out about all the upcoming newest shiniest things, the more you realize you very rarely need a new shiny thing.
posted by lia at 7:56 PM on May 13

My two-bits: don't turn off completely but do remove all connectivity from your home. If you don't already have one, set up an office outside of home (nothing fancy, could be as simple as a cafe or the local library) and attend to all your online concerns there. Save home for reading books, singing songs, watering plants, walking dogs, scaring children, playing croquet -- whatever.

I just lived this way for the past almost six months. It cut down big time on my contributions to worthy sites such as MeFi (which seemed to get on quite fine without me) ... but I did get way more reading done.
posted by philip-random at 7:56 PM on May 13 [1 favorite has favorites]

philip-random: I have thought of that very thing. As difficult as that would be to do, I have seriously considered it. That would be taking "scaling back" to a whole new level, but our ancestors managed to do it. I dumped Twitter recently because I saw it as a large exercise in narcissism (not all, but for many); the constant updates on what everyone is doing. Nobody could possibly imagine our grandparents posting messages on their front door telling people what they had for breakfast, how many pieces of postal mail was in their inbox that morning, their mood, what they had planned for the evening, on and on and then signed with a "Have a nice day! Check back after 6pm for more updates!" You may have the answer for me, philip. A time and a place for everything and leave the web at work.
posted by Gerard Sorme at 8:06 PM on May 13

The best tool that I've found in my own battle to limit my excessive internet usage has been LeechBlock (assuming you use Firefox). You can set up filters to keep you off certain sites altogether, or to limit your time on certain sites to a particular number of minutes - to be honest, I have myself on a 30 minute-per-day limit for Metafilter and several other sites, and that makes a huge difference for me. True, you can always get around it by firing up Chrome or some other browser, but just -seeing- LeechBlock's "page blocked" notice automatically pop up when I've reached my limit really helps give me the kick in the pants I need to power down my computer and get back to the rest of my life.

I must admit that I'm a little chagrined to need a tool like this, but for me at least there's no denying that it's helpful. I really like being able to get my internet fix but still have someone/something standing over me to give me that necessary push to get off before I let my whole darned day get sucked in to it.
posted by DingoMutt at 8:48 PM on May 13 [1 favorite has favorites]

(usually from some new Lifehacker review)

If you want to scale back your digital life, stop reading Lifehacker. I used to read Lifehacker and 43 Folders and all those things obsessively, and tried to justify it with my job in the web development world. But once I stopped reading them everyday, I found that I stuck with a few excellent tools (Flickr, Facebook to keep in touch with family and friends, Twitter to keep in touch with industry news, Metafilter for general entertainment, iPhone with Things for productivity). I'm open to trying something new (hence the Twitter), but I'm now an early adopter instead of a bleeding-edge experimenter.

It's the same as when I realised that I stopped buying so much crap shortly after I stuck a "No Junk Mail" sticker on my letterbox.
posted by harriet vane at 4:25 AM on May 14 [1 favorite has favorites]

Gerard, I think you may be a Productivity Hobbyist.

If that's something you're fascinated by and enjoy doing, then why not try to make a career out of it. Become a productivity consultant. Start a blog (although you'll be working in a pretty crowded marketplace, the high nerd ratio on the net means it's a natural nexus for obsessive shiny tech fascinations and endless beta testing of web tools). Write a book.

If this is making you unhappy, then you really need to step away from it. I have been gradually stepping away from things like this. A few years ago I hopped from one thing to the other like a magpie with ADD, but I've realised over time that it was largely just one huge procrastinatory avoidance behaviour.

I still procrastinate, but I have pared everything back drastically. Closed my Facebook account, got rid of old email addresses, scaled back the time and effort I spent on putting words and pictures and everything else out on the web. I do still spend a lot of time on MeFi, but I'm not spending equivalent amounts of time, energy and attention in ten other online places too.

What I've found is that I can sublimate my twitchy, shiny obsessions into cool stuff to do at work. I'm in the middle of helping my company build a wiki-based knowledge portal for the whole business. Because we've chosen one tool, stuck with it and made it work, it's taking off in a big way. I could have done what I would have two years ago and endlessly experimented, but then it wouldn't have caught on the way it has. And all my twitchy, shattered-attention-span energy goes into it. Big benefits for my company, and I've got something useful to do.

Re-reading and trying to parse your question a few times, I'm still not entirely sure you're asking. You seem to think that you have a dysfunctional behaviour pattern when it comes to technology, and you want to change that, but I'm not sure if you want to change it by actually working to change it, or if you're still looking for the magic bullet solution that will solve all of your informational problems and requirements.

Lemme tell you, as a wannabe writer and full-time nerd who has wasted a decade of life with access to the world's resources over the web, trying to find magic bullet software solutions to my chronic procrastination, lack of discipline and effort - there are no magic bullets.
posted by Happy Dave at 5:33 AM on May 14 [1 favorite has favorites]

If you want to scale back your digital life, stop reading Lifehacker.

Agreed. I was a regular reader for a while, and it was one of the most unproductive periods of my working life. Most of the 'solutions' Lifehacker recommends are just new, shiny ways to put off doing your actual work. The site's philosophy seems to be that if you take the time to download this, hack that or build the the latest money-saving whatsit, you're actually saving time and effort because your 'productivity' will be vastly improved. But this is bullshit - it relies on a seriously distorted sense of what 'work' actually is.

For most people, work isn't a constant, fungible stream of digital widget-cranking; it involves the intellect, the soul and some semblance of meaning. It involves other human beings. In the real, non-productivity-blog world, saving 72 seconds each morning with 'time-saving' automation won't necessarily cause you to spit out 72 extra seconds worth of work at the end of the day. Especially not if you end up filling your life with so many little digital 'fixes' that you become mentally exhausted from digital overload.

I really believe that most internet users only need a few digital tools to make their lives run more smoothly. I'm glad I have Gmail, Facebook, a few clever Firefox plugins and a bunch of good open source software. I'm sure that somewhere out there is some other tool I would absolutely love, but I know the time I could potentially waste trying out the every Next Great Productivity Tool would be much better spent, well, actually working on something in my field of knowledge.

It sounds like you've already found the tools that work for you - you're already thinking of culling a few. You simply don't need a constant stream of new options entering your life every day. The small percentage of Shiny New Things mentioned on Lifehacker which are actually worthwhile will find their way to you soon enough. Chances are, very best of them will end up on the Blue in plenty of time for you to still be an early adopter.
posted by embrangled at 5:41 AM on May 14 [1 favorite has favorites]

You seem to think that you have a dysfunctional behaviour pattern when it comes to technology, and you want to change that, but I'm not sure if you want to change it by actually working to change it, or if you're still looking for the magic bullet solution that will solve all of your informational problems and requirements.

It definitely sounds to me like you're looking for the magic bullet--your question is how to scale back your digital life, to which the only possible answer is Get Off The Internet And Into Real Life, but you have lots of excuses/reasons for why that's not possible or how that's not the answer you're looking for. Which means that your question, in fact, is "What is the killer app that will make this all manageable?"

There isn't one. Most of the things you read on Lifehacker or 43 Folders will fade in about four months' time because something new will come out that does X better than the version before it. Either you want to keep upgrading or you don't, and if you don't, you scale back your digital life by spending less time in the digital space.

I've been there, and found myself frittering away lots of hours on stuff that ultimately didn't make me happier or more productive. I found greater satisfaction in deleting profiles and accounts on myriad websites than I ever had in actually using those websites. It's still hard to turn off the computer without refreshing MeFi one last time, but I value the times that I do it more than the times that I don't. When I moved into an apartment by myself, I purposely did not get internet access--I didn't want to become a hermit, so I would be required to go to a cafe and ignore other people in public. Interestingly, the digital space became less important to me during the same time.
posted by peanut_mcgillicuty at 8:06 AM on May 14