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Find Silvano D'Agostino's online prose.

Today in Digital Infrastructure: Refocusing on Intentionality

Silvano D'Agostino

About once a year I spend a few hours on digital infrastructure, usually in the context of feeling information overload from The Internet™. I had lost some of the intentionality I strive for in my digital life, so today included:

Reducing my open tabs across devices from over 150 to 15. The pandemic really messed with the way I consumed articles online. Granted, my Instapaper cue has grown significantly, but it's a start…

Reducing my Twitter following list from over 300 to under 200. I go back and forth on how expansive my following list should be (expansive to dip and out of, maybe even try using Nuzzel again, or small enough that I rarely see anything I'm not interested in). I set out to get to 100-150 followings, but I'm OK with the 191 I reached. I do have a tightly controlled "Copmletionist" list whose every tweet I read and which acts as my main window unto the world. I also created an "Academia" list, including some people I unfollowed, to stay in touch with the psych-econ-business research I care about, regardless of my endeavors.

Deleting some apps from my phone. We're in the middle of a pandemic, and I realized (way too late) that I shouldn't really need my phone very much. It feels like the least intentional device, so until I take the occasional business trip again, my Mac and iPad should serve all the phone purposes better in the current context of working from home. Ideally, I'll keep the phone on a charging pad out of reach most of the day, which should greatly reduce its tracked screen time. We'll see how it goes. (This also forced me to get all my two-factor authentications on two devices, which seems smart anyway.)

Adding a bunch of RSS feeds to NetNewsWire (I use Feedly on the backend). I subscribe to around 10-15 blogs whose articles I wouldn't always catch on Twitter, and I added a few more because knowledge is cool.

Tightening some Screen Time restrictions across devices. I usually only run up against the Tweetbot restriction, so I further reduced the amount of time I want to casually be browsing parts of the internet. (These restrictions are so easy to override, they're the lightest of nudges at best, but they do help me refocus after a certain amount of time when I get distracted.)

None of this is revolutionary, but having just moved physical location, this felt like the right time to also clean up digitally.