Be Aware!

The blog post title sounds like a clickbait or an Eminem's song but I think the paradigm changed overtime. Long long time ago, we needed to be "aware" (like Jean-Claude Van Damme said above in a clumsy way) to not get killed and now everything around us tries to grab your attention (e.g. news, social networks, notifications, emails, ads).

I don't think this kind of steady attention is good for our paleo brain so I tried another experiment #1,597,463,007 for the last 3 months. The last similar experiment was in October 2020 where I disabled all social networks for one month.

Here are the rules for this new experiment (first part):
- Disabled all social networks on my computer (DNS loopback)
- Disabled all social networks on my phone (screen time = 0)
- Enable Reddit only on my phone with some screen time (5-10 min)
- Unlock those social medias for one day a month and on my computer only

Yes, it's a very long delta time of ~30 days compared to 16.66 milliseconds in gaming but I like the idea and I'm still in this mode. I might change the delta time if I release a big project for tracking, updates or feedback but it will not be in 2022 or early 2023.

And before this experiment, I was still doing the 2 next tips to reduce the context switching.

I hate useless notifications! I remember one time when I received a notification from a delivery food app that said: "Order in the next X nanoseconds and get 10% off". The result was that I uninstalled the app and I will never use it again. There is an app that I use sometimes for food delivery. After I receive the order, I uninstall the app. Otherwise, I receive random notifications about how the food is, the delivery is fine? or any random unuseful notifications. Thanks but if I have a problem, I'll contact you...

Same pattern for emails. Above is the report spam button that I use a lot for any pointless emails (e.g. surveys, promotions) or I will use the "Unsubscribe" email link if I know the source.

News

The original quote seems to be from Mark Twain:
"If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed. If you do, you're misinformed."

So here is the second part of the experiment:
- I disabled news on my computer (DNS loopback with progressive entry)
- I disabled the news on Google Chrome (mobile)
- I disabled Firefox pocket home page (desktop)

It makes non sense to see news when you want to search for something. A good way to distract you except if you are a big fan of side quests.

I think traditional media are dead from 2016 or even before. Always in panic mode with the current thing or the end of the world everyday.

Also, they work like a stack. They push on the stack the previous thing and when the current thing is less popular, they pop the stack to talk non-stop in a spamming mode about the previous thing...

The good benefit with this experiment is once a month, I will hear about the end of the world instead of everyday.

New York

Here are some pictures from my New York trip I did 2 months ago:

Thanks for reading,

JS.