Personal

My “Real” News Cleanse

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Recently I have started to look at things that I spend time on that don’t make me happy.  The first thing I gravitated towards was social media. I recently wrote about that in my detox plan for it. The next thing that ended up on my very short list was the news.

Over the years I have written several times about my love hate relationship with the news.  These two entries from August & September 2005 one from 2005.  Another one from 2012. As a young kid I used to watch it and be fascinated by it. By my late 20s I was jaded by the 24-hour news cycle. I spent the better part of the last 20 years avoiding and then binging on the news. The only exception is tech news. I’ve been pretty consistently reading that. Tech news usually doesn’t depress me and it helps me stay current in my profession.

With all that’s going on in the world today I’m not getting very much positive out of reading the news every day. I have kept doing it because I want to stay informed. When I read several different sources talking about how I statistically would be happier not reading it I thought about ignorance is bliss. It is. In this case there’s really not much I can do when I read headlines.  So what do I get out of it? I want to be informed however is being informed worth being miserable? I’ve tried being miserably informed for a while and it does not feel like working so I will try ignorant happiness.

Practically speaking when I have a coffee or eat lunch or commute I browse headlines via RSS feeds. I also read a few key websites.  Even after curating down what sources I look at each day I am still depressed by what I read on general news sites.

The habit I plan to change is to stop looking at news sites altogether. As a start I will also cut out the vast majority of the RSS feeds I read. I will still look at some technology, productivity, mindfulness, and entertainment (Sci-Fi) sites. It’s hard to go cold turkey so I will keep looking at those since I find them interesting. The technology sites also help in staying current with the industry or so I keep telling myself.

I know that simply browsing articles even if they’re not stress inducing news articles is not good for me. I figure that what I proposed to do is a good transition. With the time I free up white like to spend it reading more books. I have a queue of them lined up. All I have to do is start reading them. The hardest part I think is building that new routine that doesn’t include looking at new sites & feeds. I almost by muscle memory will type in theguardian.co.uk when I have a spare minute. It is hard to stop myself. Instead I want to start taking spare time I have and use it to update my journal in Day One. Or something else more productive than reading news.  Once I get started I hope to cut down on the other things I plan to keep reading at first.  Over time I hope to transition those interests into books of the same topic instead of 2-5 minute articles.

As with my attempt to cut out social media or drastically reduce it only time will tell how successful I am. By the time this is posted I should hopefully have a routine down. Successful or not I hope to touch back on this topic in a few months to see how I did.

Going Sort of Cold Turkey on Social Media

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For a while now I’ve been focused on personal productivity. I consider myself pretty organized already.  I use personal kanban, organizing my thoughts in a database to track information.  I have been trying to journal.  Even with all that  I have also been serious about how to continue to improve on my productivity.  My dad always said work smarter not harder.

More recently over the past few months I have been reading a lot about mindfulness and ways to improve day-to-day happiness. It’s a fascinating topic.  It is surprising that I have noticed several general themes overlapping between what I’ve read about improving personal productivity and mindfulness.

The first thing universally accepted as a big time suck is reading and participating in social media. It also shockingly turns out to be something that generally doesn’t make people happy. Yet many of us still do it. In early 2017 I cut out my social media consumption almost completely. That of course coincided with my not logging into Facebook for months. When I started posting pictures on Facebook again I inevitably logged in to see if there were comments. That coincided with my return to blogging so I would login to also check on comments to those posts as well. I am at a point now where I know I shouldn’t be logging in and I feel like I’m about ready to just stop cold. I’ll keep writing and posting on my blog but reading Facebook feeds needs to go.

I use Twitter as well. Presently I’ve been using it keep tabs on some financial technology companies I am interested in. As much is that is using social media I find that I’m giving myself an exception by continuing to read that. It helps me stay on top of technical trends and that in turn helps me stay ahead in my career.

When I think about it I really do not get much out of looking at social media. There is a conversation here there with friends near and far that I cherish. Those are few and far between compared to all of the nonsense and polarizing news articles littering the cesspool of my newsfeed. The idea of Facebook and Twitter is great.  The in practice isn’t so much.  Besides not being productive I really am not much happier by engaging in it all. It is hard to understand why I keep doing it then.

I have been thinking about this all for a while now.  I am finally ready to action for myself.  What I’m going to  is simply stop. I am going to remove Facebook from my phone. I am not going to check my newsfeed. What I will keep doing is periodically checking some specific groups that are useful and that I contribute to. If I want to do that though I will need to do it from a computer.  I will also continue to review a few specific Twitter lists I’ve curated for keeping up on technology. I plan on keeping Twitter on my phone for now.  That’s it though. No trolling to see what others are doing. No commenting or replying to comments. And definitely no glancing at news articles or news headlines others garbage posts that litter my newsfeed.

What I hope to do instead is message friends more. I want to have direct conversations virtual or otherwise. At the time of this writing I hope to start this immediately.. By the time this gets published on my blog however it should be several weeks.  Hopefully by then I will have been successful.  I sure hope so.

In addition or along with this I have to address my news consumption. That’s the next habit I will write about Stay tuned, or not.

Independence Day or In England We Call It Wednesday

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Happy Birthday America.  Pictured in this post is me prior to moving to England.  My brother in law bought me that shirt since he wanted me to remember the country I come from.  At time of writing this post I am not sure if i am going to wear this shirt today.  That is the plan however.

Now I need to find a good place for BBQ for lunch.  I am pretty sure there will not be any fireworks for us today.

Mojitos Box is Open

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Mixology Tiki Bar

I keep forgetting we have fresh mint in our garden. Finally M reminded me while we were out so i could remember to get fresh Lime and club soda so I could try making Mojitos. We love them and it is one of the drinks i have been meaning to try at home. Our first two test drinks were both pretty good.

That means that Pandora / Mojitos box is open. I am told and can independently confirm we have a good supply of mint in the garden so my only limiting factor is how many limes we have on hand.

Now I have a good use for our Tiki glasses. Next up is trying to make Pims now that i got real British lemonade.

Mr Whippy vs Mr Softee

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Being a New Yorker I default to the stance that Mr Softee would kick Mr Whippy’s butt in a throw down. That being said Mr Softee is a cheap bastard and doesn’t offer a Flake (for 30 pence more).

For the uninitiated a flake is basically a stick of chocolate that goes into your ice cream that if you choose to you can scoop your ice cream with. Of course we (the girls and I) just eat it.

The Story Of My Returned Motivation To Write

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I am not so sure who “they” are however “they” say to start at the beginning. For this post thinking about where that beginning is has been murky. When I moved to London I had over a dozen different drafts of things I wanted to write about. I still have most of those drafts and would love to write about those topics. The realities of the move were I had little time to write when we first arrived. In early January when we arrived that was not a problem since I had a backlog of 4 to 6 weeks of written material to use on my posting schedule.  I just depended on how many posts I wanted to schedule per week. At one point I had 3 posts scheduled a week and I was able to streach things out by going down to two.

Then everything changed in mid-January. I  got the call that my dad was dying.  It wasn’t a surprise.  It was unexpectedly so soon.  He had been sick for a while.  The whole situation unfolded much more suddenly than I had thought. By the time I went back to New York and returned back to London I was focused more on getting back into my routine dealing with our shipping container that writing.

At some point I want to write a lot more about my dad’s death however not ready to do that yet.  In any event I still had all these ideas about writing, I just didn’t want to. Over the past few months I posted quick blurbs that I’ve thought about however nothing substantial. This also translated into not really journaling much privately either.  That was something I really enjoyed doing.  I ended up simply logging where I had gone with hopes of going back and writing some blurbs later.

Besides the lack of motivation, it was very challenging to find time. On one hand it is easy to say I was busy.  I have read enough to know that busy is a terrible excuse.  If something was important to me I would simply find time. The reality of the situation was I was depressed about my dad and tired from trying to adopt a new routine.  All I wanted to do at the end of a day when the girls were in sleep was to relax. In recent weeks my wife and I have both felt much more at ease that we are finally settled in. That has helped in getting me to journal more in recent weeks.

Now I feel like I am in the right place to start branching out into blog posts. That brings me to this post. I didn’t need to write all that, however as with much of my writing it felt therapeutic to write it.  And that is why I am writing about this topic as my first full post in a while.

Goodbye Old Friend

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It may be just a flashlight however it something I’ve had for 25 years. The batteries are corroded and I cannot get the hex screw out to try soaking it in lemon juice. It’s now off to the recycle center and I need to shop for a new one.

I remember carrying that around almost everywhere when I was volunteering as an EMT in college.

Even Younger Me Was On Top Of Backups

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Not quite 3-2-1 Backup at the time however I have resilient copies of DVD backups from 1999. Both still work. I did become fully 3-2-1 backup compliant years later when I made an ISO on a hard drive and then backed that drive up.

I can’t bring myself to part with one of these. And on top of that I have the same double backups for every year throughout the 2000’s on DVD.

No I do not have a good answer why I didn’t purge this before I moved to another continent.