Baby Steps Month starts with two simple ideas: delete what you already have, and be more careful about what you keep next.
This step combines both ideas into something more proactive: unfollow the sources that waste your attention.
Baby Steps Week 3: Unfollow
"Unfollow" is a relatively young word, but most people instantly understand what it means. In social-media contexts, it means ending your connection to a person or company so you no longer receive whatever they broadcast.
It's fundamentally similar to "unsubscribe" in email. In both cases, 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.
The word follow feels especially useful because it captures what's really happening: you are letting something pull you in a particular direction and claim your attention. "Subscribing" doesn't feel quite as visceral, even when the underlying action is basically the same.
As you get better at deleting things and pausing before saving new things, you'll begin to notice repeat offenders—specific sources, senders, or categories of information that don't meet your standards anymore.
Pay attention when that happens.
Instead of only rejecting one-off bits of clutter, you can multiply the effect of that strategy by cutting distractions off at the source.
That might mean:
- unsubscribing from an email newsletter
- unfollowing someone on social media
- turning off notifications from a YouTube creator or app that keeps feeding you low-value mental candy
That last category matters more than it might seem. Maybe a newsletter only takes five minutes to read, but it regularly points you to blog posts, videos, or other material that quietly consumes far more time than you intended. In that case, the real cost is much larger than the original message.
None of us can consume all the media we'd like. That's reality. But it's also okay. Once you accept that, it becomes easier to consciously decide what's important enough to keep following.
Deleting and hesitating before you save something are useful habits. Unfollowing is the next logical extension: instead of deleting the item after it arrives, "delete" the source that keeps sending it.