As a follower of this blog (if indeed there are any) you might have noticed I haven’t written here much lately. And I haven’t written much for my other written labour of love Human 2.0 either. So what have I been doing – especially while I’m off social networks? Surely that would have given me more free time? Well I had hoped to write more here – but much of my time has been taken up by a different sort of writing – assignments for the Non-Fiction writing workshop I have been doing at Thomas More Institute. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing though. The assignments have challenged me as a writer in new ways and have undoubtedly improved my writing. So I thought I’d publish a few of the things I’ve written here, along with some brief thoughts and comments on what I learnt from them.
I’ll use this post as a header post and update this post to add links to the pieces as I publish them.
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.]