Andrew Melder

I’ve been feeling a bit overwhelmed lately. Not entirely focused on anything, lacking any productivity.

So three days ago, I made a change: I disabled my Threads, Instagram and LinkedIn accounts.

Since then, I can’t say I’m magically more productive; however I do feel like the noise has been reduced in my world. I suspect this is the lack of algorithm-based feeds in my life with these three social networks removed. I’m still on others like Mastodon, YouTube & Reddit, but the ability to turn off or ignore any algorithmic feed (if they have any) is useful.

I can go into these services, use them and then move on without the pull of the dopamine reward of the pull-to-refresh function coming along.

Thinking about it further and reading a post from Lee Peterson on the subject, I’m starting to look at reducing my consumption of podcasts throughout the day.

I listen to a lot of podcasts, but many of them are simply background noise as I go through my day. This is not helpful for my focus, as the voices and discussion tend to hamper my own thought process.

So while I haven’t deleted my podcast app yet, I’m making a conscious effort to no longer randomly put them on in the background.

We shall see if any of these changes stick. I suspect professionally I may seek to reenable LinkedIn at some point. The dopamine part of me misses Threads, but I think about how at ease my brain has been since I disabled it. Instagram only exists to give me access to Threads, so that it pretty easy to keep off.