hackett.life
Do you ever feel like the days are slipping away so fast that life seems to be accelerating? I’ve been feeling that way lately. I need to come up with a strategy to help me get more out of my day. Exercise and doing something meaningful every day has to be a priority. I’m also starting to think that I should be waking up a lot earlier than I do right now.
The Center For Humane Technology can help you to break free from your social media driven smartphone addictions.
I’m not going cold turkey…yet. I have deleted all social media apps from my smartphone, and I’m working out the best way to remove myself from WhatsApp. The latter is difficult, especially as I am involved with a football club that uses the app to communicate with each other and the parents of the children in our care.
I am starting to think that I will just have to tell everyone that I will not be using any Facebook owned products, along with Google products and, of course, social media apps and services. I have given myself until the end of the year to make alternative arrangements. Part of me just wants to pull the plug on it all, the practical part of me is telling me to wait. I’m on the fence, but leaning towards a big switch off, I really don’t think anyone will notice.
The more I read about the evils of the giant tech companies that mine our every move for data, the more I want to leave. My blog is my connection to the internet, that should be enough. Maybe I will “bite-the-bullet” sooner, rather that later?
That is all.
The more I think about it, the more I want to take a month away from using social media, and from using my smartphone. If I am going to get Karta to spend one day-per-week without using his phone and social media accounts, I need to lead by example.
The only reason that I will pick up my smartphone will be to check my WhatsApp messages I can check my emails and Signal messages on my PC. I am also working to move most of my email over to Protonmail from Outlook, although this will take some time to complete.
The Punkt MP-02 will become my device of choice for making phone calls and for sending SMS messages. I have a decent compact digital camera for when I want to take photos.
Ultimately, I will stop using products from companies like Facebook, Google and Microsoft. I am now taking time to seek out software from companies that have strong privacy values and will not share any of my information with third parties of any kind. Although rare, they are becoming easier to find.
I am making a concerted effort to slow down. I don’t need to check my email every five minutes. I don’t need push notifications, and I do not need social media.
That is all.
In fact, I think that I should add a 7 day social media detox into my week long fast. The urge to purge is so very strong at the moment. I have managed to whittle down the amount of friends that I have on Facebook to just 25 and my Twitter to just 99. Instagram is proving to be harder to trim, but again, if I can get the number of accounts that I follow below 100, I’ll be happy.
My ultimate goal is to stop using social media more than a couple of times per week. After all, I have this blog for spewing nonsense into the world.
Privacy concerns and the right to a private life have long steered me towards a technology purge. I will start that purge in 2020.
I’ve had a massive clear out of my Twitter account over at @jphackett
Several years worth of tweets have been thrown into the digital skip and sent away for burning.
The reasons for this are twofold, firstly, I am trying to keep my use of social media to the absolute bare minimum; and secondly, I will only be posting my content to Twitter from now on, so having a clean canvas felt like the right thing to do.
I have switched off Instagram, and I had already left Facebook, back at the start of April, which has been a revelation.
The other day, I de-activated my Instagram account.
I have no idea if I will ever go back, and at the moment I can honestly say that I don’t miss it.
At the same time, I took down my Twitter account while I decided what I should do with it. I have now re-activated it, but not before I made arrangements to wipe all of my previous 5000 tweets.
I won’t be tweeting much anymore. But, I will keep the account “ticking over”, just in case I need to return to it at some point in the future.
I have decided to try to reduce the amount of time that I sit in front of my computer every day.
I want to post relevant things to this blog, but I will limit doing so to just once a day via my PC.
The WordPress Android app is an excellent way to be able to create post drafts, so by combining the app and by using a notebook to capture my thoughts throughout the day, I hope to minimise my screen time.
Hopefully, that will free up some time for me to catch up on the pile of books that I have got to read.
I am still on the fence about Twitter and Instagram. Both of those platforms will be placed into hibernation for a bit so that I can take a while to think through what I am going to do with my digital life.
I said back at the start of the year that I will be turning my back on the traditional social media channels; I am hoping that will be the case by the end of the year.
For now, though, I have a Fortnite birthday party to organise.
We will soon be taking a long overdue holiday.
We’re not leaving the country, nothing extravagant, just getting away from it all for a week.
As some of you may be aware, my laptop died a few weeks back. I replaced it with a desktop and a dual monitor setup so that it won’t be coming on holiday with us, and that is not a bad thing.
I have decided to leave everything behind, except my smartphone (which will have the “DO NOT DISTURB” function switched on for the duration, whenever it might get switched on, which won’t be very often. I have bought a book to read while we’re away, I intend to start and finish it during the week.
I truly intend to be “off-grid” for the first time in a long, long time. So until I return, it’s goodbye for now.
Social media copies gambling methods ‘to create psychological cravings’
Wanting to be less involved in the world is not a bad thing, surely?
Lately, I have been making more time for myself and my family. I want to remove myself from all of the distractions that “being social” brings with it.
Why do I have to be social? Let me rephrase that, why do people expect me to be social. My circle of friends is very, very small. I have two people (other than my wife) that I can genuinely call my good friends.
I think that that is more than enough. Although I write here in what is quite obviously a public forum, I don’t want the world hearing and seeing everything that I am doing from one day to the next.
With this in mind, I have quit almost all social media. I still need to button up a few errant accounts, but generally speaking, I am making progress.
The next phase of my plan is to slowly withdraw from all of the voluntary work that I have been doing over the last year. I won’t leave people in the lurch, but at the same time I will not be taking on anything else. I will also quit all of my freelance work and instead move all of my attention to raising my son and keeping our home.
This isn’t a new thing for me, in fact, I have dabbled with the idea of doing this sort of thing in the past, you can read about that here.
Anyhoo, that’s it for now.
Over and out.
The Declutter Experiment
In late 2017, Cal Newport invited his mailing list subscribers to participate in an experiment he called the digital declutter.
The idea was simple. During January 2018, participants would take a break from “optional technologies” in their lives, including, notably, social media. At the end of the 31-day period, the participants would then rebuild their digital lives starting from a blank slate — only allowing back in technologies for which they could provide a compelling motivation.
Cal expected around 40 – 50 people would agree to participate in this admittedly disruptive exercise.
His guess was wrong.
http://calnewport.com/blog/2018/03/28/on-analog-social-media/
There’s not much to say about this decision. For a couple of years now I have been procrastinating about quitting social media, or at the very least severely curbing my use of it.
So, I decided that enough was enough. I have been spending far too much time sitting at my computer, mindlessly trawling through my timeline and staring at a screen filled with the same old shit.
Except for Instagram, I deleted all social media apps from my phone. This was partly down to the immense amount of battery life they consumed, but mostly it was because of the constant notifications that were appearing. I turned off those notification features, but it was all too easy to open one of the apps, just to see what was happening in the world. They had to go.
Too many times in the past I have jumped off of Facebook, but only ever temporarily. I chose just to deactivate my account, rather than hit delete. Today though, I took the plunge.
For the first time in a long, long time, I had no reason to take my smartphone out with me. I didn’t need anything it could offer, aside from being able to make a phone call. Instead, I set up a call divert feature and took my Punkt dumb-phone out with me instead. I didn’t have to look at it once.
I’m going to keep my Twitter account active, although I will not be using it unless I need to find something out quickly or send a direct message to a follower or a company that I follow. I’ve changed the settings on that account to make it private and have done the same thing with my Instagram account.
The next phase of my digital spring clean will be to quit watching the news, either on TV or via the internet. I’m not burying my head in the sand; I’m just trying to see what difference it makes to me on a daily basis. I have a feeling that I will have more time to focus on getting healthy and spending quality time with family and friends.
I honestly believe that news and social media in the digital age have conspired to make me into a grumpy old curmudgeon. Well, enough of that shit, here’s to the new me!
Until next time, adieu.
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