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The November Project: the What and the How
Posted by Alex on 31 Oct, 2010 in Lifenotes | 0 comments
If you read my last post you’ll know I’m taking a break from social media for a month. That post explained the general reasons why.
In this post I’ll add a little more detail on what exactly I’m doing, and how.
Here’s the things I’m doing for November..
- Blocking my computers from accessing Facebook or Twitter.
- Turning off all Facebook and Twitter alerts on my email and on my phone.
- Deleting all Facebook or Twitter-related apps on my iPhone and iPad.
- Turning off and putting away my Chumby.
- Unlink Twitter from Flipboard, sobeeslite and other news apps.
- Turning off NutshellMail and Twilert, two services I use which send Twitter and Facebook updates to my inbox.
- Disabling Google Alerts, Slashdot newsletters, and any other regular emails that arrive in my inbox.
- Turning off Google Buzz within Gmail (I can’t disable it completely without deleting my Google Profile).
- Disable all notifications (including email and IM) on my iPhone and iPad.
- Disabling anything else that pops up early in November that I might have forgotten about that seems like a regular notification or distraction.
2-10 are all fairly straightforward.
1 is a little more interesting.
The solution I am going for is to edit the hosts file on my computer (/etc/hosts on the Mac), and add an entry which remaps twitter.com and facebook.com to different addresses – probably google news and my blog respectively). As of yet I haven’t found a way to do this on the iPad or iPhone so I may just need to rely on willpower there… Unless anyone has any suggestions?
[To read the follow up to this post, reflecting on the experience, go here.]