Building a Better News Wall

[jesse_the_k]

...after the election I let all my news wall filters go down.

It felt great to be *f*r*e*e* but I encountered lots of toxic stuff that made me anxious as fuck. So I raised my walls a little bit, but still wasn't sleeping well, unable to focus on things I'd formerly liked to do.

Now I've found a balance which works for me.

I've set up my net filtering software -- Freedom.to -- to create cracks large enough to hunt down information, and scheduled to minimize plunging into driven doom-scrolling.

News sites are only available between 11:30 and 11:59 am.

Twitter is only available between 12:30 and 1pm.

I can't follow news links from Twitter -- have to wait a day. Mostly, that's fine. Happily MyGuy, who's connected to the original streaming service (radio) has promised to let me know of anything vital.

Comments

[seascribble]

Fuck I need to find a way to limit my twitter consumption.

Twitter is a fucking time suck as well as doom scroll

[jesse_the_k]

It's been engineered to wrest your attention away from anything else.

The Freedom.to tool works on Mac, Windows, iOS and Android. I bought a forever subscription for $50 a couple years back, and it's the best money I've ever spent. Up to US$65 right now on special

Re: Twitter is a fucking time suck as well as doom scroll

[seascribble]

Hmmm very interesting. I think for me I need to cut even further loose and just put the ding dang device down. But that might help with it...

[gloss]

Your set-up sounds eminently reasonable and I'm glad you've got processes in place for proactively dealing with anxiety & everything. <3

[jesse_the_k]

Thanks!

It's taken a lot of experimentation, and I'm proud I've managed to reduce my pain (from sitting enthralled staring at Stuff) and lighten my brain.

[tozka]

I like your set-up! I've actually added parental controls on my phone and blocked Twitter entirely; now I can only access it from my desktop, where it's much easier to stop scrolling and go do something else before the doomscrolling starts up.

Thanks

[jesse_the_k]

I'm impressed that you have the self-control to click away from Twitter on desktop.

[tarasacon]

Oh, sounds like a good approach!

re: our conversation about this a few days ago:
I poked at the menu for the browser on my phone and figured out how to remove any immediately visible links to news sites. Now if I want the news I now have to type in at least part of the URL. With that barrier to access I’m doing pretty good about limiting news to once a day, sometimes even every day and a half or so. It’s definitely better for my sanity.

[jesse_the_k]

Insisting on typed input when you're using a phone is a great hack.

14 cheers for more sanity!

[esteefee]

sounds like you've found the right strategy!

[jesse_the_k]

Awwww, yis.

So far it's working!