Digital Declutter and Learning Godot checkin for 2019-04-29

I'm nearing the end of my digital declutter. This is my check-in for the week:

  • Reduce my use of social media to only a few times per day. I've had some mixed success with this. I'm starting to feel the pull of wanting to check in more to see how folks are doing. But I've also found that using the tools I'm using (tootstream on the computer, Pluspora on the web, etc.) have allowed me to keep more of my focus. Tootstream doesn't auto-refresh so it's not the constant barrage of incoming stimuli. I think that's helpful. But it's also not as visual as the web.

  • No social media on the phone. See above. Though I have found that I can waste my time with anything (reading Ralph Vaughan Williams biography on Wikipedia on the phone while standing in the kitchen was not my proudest moment this past week).

  • No podcast catcher on the phone. This was the first thing to give as I mowed the lawn. When I mow the lawn I enjoy listening to podcasts as it gives my mind something else to do while I'm working on the lawn. I knew this would happen though, so I'm still calling this a win so far.

  • Disengage from Reddit. I might subscribe to the Fate RPG subreddit at some point, but for now I'm really no missing this.

  • Utilize RSS more. I've found that I'm starting to use RSS as my distraction throughout the day. This isn't helped by it being in my email client and being a few keystrokes away. Part of it also is because if I don't look at it then I'll be greeted with a boat-load of new articles. That said I do subscribe to things that I could probably let do, and most of my RSS reading is deleting articles that I'm not interested in. I'll need to play with this some more.

  • Cutting back on the number of times I check email. Some days this is easy, and other days I found myself looking in there to see if something showed up. It's something that I'm going to need to be aware of more, and something that I'll need to focus on.

  • Cutting out Youtube. Still noticing the same patterns when I'm looking for music to share with others. Perhaps I need to make a hard cut on this and say that if it isn't on Bandcamp it doesn't get shared. Also I follow way too many folks on Youtube and will need to start culling those down.

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

  • Creating more with Godot. The pressure of the upcoming presentation has given me renewed interest in this. I have a working clone of a game that was released in the 1970s working (it's not complete, but it should suit enough of my purposes). I'm hoping that my progress so far isn't culled completely when I deliver these presentations. I rather enjoy working with this tool.

  • Writing / designing more. Unless you count presentations for Penguicon then this hasn't gotten much attention this week.

  • Administration. I've been working to make more space for this. So far it's been getting some slow progress, but I'll take it.

  • Reading. I've not expanded much of my reading habits.

  • Tidying. Presentation crunch, so no progress here.

  • Playing games. Some slight progress here, but not a lot. I do want to focus more on board games in the coming months.

  • Interacting with human beings. Not much progress here.

I think I'm going to extend this challenge to the end of Penguicon and slowly reintroduce things. I can see the first thing will be the web client for Mastodon, but I'll add that slowly and monitor my progress. Maybe I'll make it so during working hours I can't use it, and if I want to use it later on I can. But I can feel myself looking forward to this, so I know that could be a subtle trap. Will still need to play with this some more.


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