Next 30 day challenge: social media/news cleanse

For January 2015, I tried to declutter around the house for 15 minutes a day. We now have a couple rooms that are much cleaner, and I gave away a bunch of magazines.

For February 2015, my 30 day challenge was to go on daily 15 minute walks with my wife. That was nice.

Lately I’ve been spending more time than I’d like on social media and reading news sites. So for March 2015, I’m going to do a social media and news cleanse. I’ve done a social media cleanse several times before and it’s usually quite helpful for getting re-centered.

Here’s the steps that I’m taking:
– I’m using the StayFocusd Chrome extension to limit myself to 15 minutes a day of Google News, Twitter, Google+, Hacker News, Techmeme, Nuzzel, Reddit, and Imgur.
– On my R7000 home router I’m using the “block site” functionality for several of these sites. It looks like the R7000 can block HTTP sites, but not HTTPS.
– On my phone, I’m removing the new tab thumbnails for these sites. I’m also removing some social media apps from my home screen.

I figure that either I’ll get some good stuff done, read a lot of books, or die of boredom. I may (rarely) drop a link on social media, but if you see me just hanging out, please remind me to close my tab and move on. 🙂

New 30 day challenge: “hermit mode”

I’ve been spending more time surfing the web on my laptop than I’d like to. I’ve also noticed more emails that lure me into short tasks, but eventually eat up a large chunk of my day.

I’d prefer to be spending more time working on projects, reading, and unplugging. So my new 30 day challenge will be to enter a sort of “hermit mode” where I don’t spend more than an hour a day on my laptop. I’m also going to try to say “no” more often. My hope is that if I turn down a few meetings for a while, I’ll end up working more on projects that I want to tackle. I don’t know whether that will work, but I’m going to try it. I might still write a few blog posts or say something on Twitter, but I want that to be a conscious choice, not just something I back into.

This challenge will be a hard one to judge for success, but my hope is that at the end of the month, I’ll be making more active choices about how I spend my time, and tackling more things that I want to do.

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