It's Tidy Tuesday in Week 3 of Baby Steps Month, where we explore easy-to-understand and quick-to-accomplish tasks that move us away from a cluttered data mess and toward clean and manageable technology.
In the first half of this month, we started with two fundamental ideas: delete things you already have, and be more mindful of keeping new things. Objectively, doing these two things over time will lead you to a better (or, at least, less cluttered) situation with your data and technology. This week, we'll look at a combination of these ideas, extended beyond how I've discussed it before.
Baby Steps Week 3: Unfollow
You've started deleting things here and there, proving to yourself that you can eliminate what you don't want.
You've begun to pay more attention when choosing whether to save some new information and so reduce how quickly you collect new stuff.
Now, we will combine the first two ideas into something more proactive: unfollow the sources that are wasting your attention.
"Unfollow" is a bit of a strange word. According to Merriam-Webster, the first known usage of the word was in 2008. As words go, it's certainly in its infancy. But I'd bet most of you immediately know what it means. Generally used in the context of social media, "unfollowing" is the act of ending your subscription to some person's or company's feed to no longer receive whatever information they broadcast to those interested enough to follow them.
It's fundamentally similar to the word "unsubscribe," which we usually use in the context of email. Technically, it's the same concept. You're deciding to cut off the flow of incoming information between you and someone else. It's like turning down the volume of digital noise, reducing the flow of content from the digital firehose.
I like the term "follow" (or "unfollow") because it's visceral. It more accurately reflects your choice and what's involved in it: pulling you in a particular direction, requiring your attention to stay on track. "Subscribing" doesn't have the same feel, even if it's arguably the same action in specific contexts.
So what's the point?
As you hone your deletion skills (Week 1) and regularly reconsider what digital content you genuinely want to save (Week 2), you'll begin to notice certain repeat offenders. You'll find specific sources, senders, or even entire categories of information that don't meet your new discriminating standards. Pay attention when this happens. Watch for more of them.
Instead of catching one-off instances where you can decide not to grow your digital collection (which is excellent!), you can greatly multiply that strategy's effectiveness by cutting off these distractions at the source.
This might mean unsubscribing from an email newsletter. It might be unfollowing someone on social media. It might mean "unclicking that little bell" to modify a common YouTuber phrase, so you are no longer fed mental candy that saps hours of your life but doesn't actually do anything worthwhile.
To that last point, identifying secondary sources of useless (or unnecessary) information is a great accomplishment. Perhaps you get a newsletter that only takes you five minutes to read once a week, but it regularly directs you to more tantalizing material that requires a far more considerable time investment: blog posts, videos, or other media that you become aware of and then feel guilty when you don't consume it as you planned. If you stopped getting the newsletter, you'd save time and avoid stress.
None of us can take in all the media we'd like. That's reality. But it's also okay. Acknowledging this makes it easier to consciously decide what's important enough to spend time on.
Combine the practices of deleting and holding back when you'd rather save something. Instead, "delete" the source that gave you something you decided to discard. That's all "unfollowing" is.
What do you think--can you find yourself following fewer people next week than you are today?
Happy data-taming!