I'm surprised this is the first check-in for Digital Decluttering. I was hoping to make this more of a weekly exercise, but I've also been not doing well with keeping up on my next actions lists.

I'm gong to do a play-by-play of how I've been doing with this experiment so far, since we're about to the half-way point:

• Reduce my use of social media to only a few times per day. I've been pretty good about this. Also I've been completely logged out of octodon.social save for using Tootstream. What I've found is that I feel rather disconnected from the goings-on of the world from that perspective. I've only religiously been checking lists and peeking in from time to time. On the one hand I'm a little unnerved at how disconnected I feel from folks on there, but at the same time I'm wondering how connected I was in the first place. Going to explore this some more as the month wears on.

• No social media on the phone. I've semi-cheated on this by using ssh on the phone to look at tootstream, but for the most part this has been a real win. I don't feel the need to just sit after dinner and wade through a bunch of posts on Mastodon. I'm quite enjoying that feeling.

• No podcast catcher on the phone. I've taken to listening to more music, though I still use the squeezebox to listen to podcasts. I do enjoy podcasts on the phone when I'm mowing so I suspect that will change once the warmer weather hits.

• Disengage from Reddit. Done. I don't miss it. I might subscribe to one or two subreddits when this is done, but otherwise I don't see this coming back.

• Utilize RSS more. I wish more folks used RSS and blogged more, because I find RSS rather calming. I've also only kept up with RSS once per day.

• Cutting back on the number of times I check email. Didn't give this one as much focus. I have been trying to utilize mutt more to keep my email checking more focused, but unfortunately this week relied a lot on email so the checking happened more than I think it should.

• Cutting out Youtube. Ho boy. I hadn't realized how much Youtube can ratchet its presence up when you're not paying attention. I noticed this most when I would look for music to share and found myself digging through Youtube's archives of past shows, videos and what-not. Before long I would be sucked away into a time vortex, and not the good kind. I think I'll either need to cut it out completely (which is probably the best option) or be more aware of how I am using it and be more mindful of the time that I'm spending on it (eg: set a timer or something).

The replacements I've been trying so far in order to keep from being glued to digital distractions are:

• Creating more with Godot. There's nothing like a looming presentation on something you don't quite understand to help keep you focused. I've not been great at keeping up the pressure but I've been slowly learning more as I've progressed.

• Writing / designing more. Not quite there yet.

• Administration. Ahem. No progress here. I'm really not great about updating my machine to newer versions of distributions.

• Reading. I've been pretty good about doing more reading.

• Tidying. This got a little out of hand when I noticed some old floppy disks in a bin and wondered what might be on them. If I haven't looked at them in the past 10 years the likelihood of there being anything critical on them is pretty remote.

• Playing games. Nope. No progress.

• Interacting wit human beings. Unfortunately with the closure of our coffee shop and my schedule being as it is this hasn't gotten much progress.

Still experimenting and still plugging away at this. I'm looking forward to seeing more positive results with this experiment.