25 | 📜 Curating our content feeds
We spend a lot of time consuming content online, so we might as well make sure it's as useful as possible. But how? Through curation. Let me explain.
Hello,
I've been thinking a lot recently about what I consume online. Social media, emails, news - 'content'.
For me, Instagram is mostly memes and FOMO.
Twitter is for Fantasy Premier League, football news and whatever's trending - useful about 0.1% of the time.
Email is for receipts, newsletters, spam.
All in all, not very useful. And, considering I'm trying to reduce my screen time and social media use, it's in my interests to make what time I do spend online as useful as possible.
Our content feeds are under our control
I've noticed that over time, I've come to accept what's in various feeds I consume - Instagram, twitter, email - as they are.
If I see something I don't like, or that isn't useful/interesting, I scroll past. It doesn't usually occur to me to do something about it.
I've spoken to a few friends about this and their experience is the same.
When we're in consume mode, we forget that we can still curate what we see.
Puppy photos and #Fitspo are great, for the most part. Spam emails and political news doomscrolling are not.
We are spending upwards of several hours every day consuming content online.
It makes sense to at least make this a useful endeavour.
Memes and news are fine in short spells, but a constant stream isn't going to do much good.
This also applies to emails - your inbox belongs to you. Nobody else can curate it for you.
So, don't accept waking up to 50 new emails - 49 of them being spam. Unsubscribe and make your inbox useful again.
Imagine for a moment that a new drug comes on the market. It’s super-addictive, and in no time everyone’s hooked. Scientists investigate and soon conclude that the drug causes, I quote, ‘a misperception of risk, anxiety, lower mood levels, learned helplessness, contempt and hostility towards others, and desensitization'......That drug is the news.
Humankind - Rutger Bregnan
Curate your feeds
Social media platforms curate our feeds for us, showing us more of the things we engage with, and less of the things we don't.
This makes sense from a business standpoint, given the main aim of these platforms is to keep us on for as long as possible.
Higher time on the platform = more ads.
If there's something that turns us away, the platforms will recognise this and show us it less. Therefore, keeping us longer for next time.
However - that's not to say that we should rely on platforms to do it for us.
And with emails, our Spotify playlists, and podcast feeds, only we can change what we see.
So next time we're scrolling, it's important to remember that what we see doesn't have to stay like that.
We can unfollow annoying accounts, unsubscribe from podcasts we don't like and filter and unsubscribe from irritating spam emails.
Personally, I've been unfollowing all celebrities online for a start, and unsubscribing from all spam emails and brands that I never subscribed to in the first place.
Put simply, the more we curate our feeds, the more useful to our happiness and productivity they'll be.
We spend plenty of time online - so it might as well be an effective way to use it.
See you next week!
Jake
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This Week’s Recommendation 🔝
OS 📱 - iOS 15 has just been released and is ready to be downloaded. There are 100s of new features available to use, with the best one being 'focus mode'. It's basically Do Not Disturb mode on steroids. It allows you to block all distractions on your phone in order to stay focused and stay productive. Worth a look! MKBHD has done a great quick summary here.
This Week I’m: ⬇️
Reading 📚 - War Doctor - David Nott.
Listening to 🎧 - The Diary of a CEO (Steven Bartlett) - Steven is a ridiculously eloquent entrepeneur that gets the very best out of his interviewees while sharing his own wisdom. All despite being just 28 🤯. I've just bought his book and will update in due course.
Visiting 🍕 - a new Chicago-style deep dish pizza place in Soho. Bring it on 🍕.
Planning 🌍 - a trip to Bristol and potentially somewhere in the Canary Islands for Jan/Feb.
Looking forward to 🎅🏼 - It’s only 89 days til Christmas…
This Week’s Quote 💬
Usually it’s when you come back from a war zone and the end of a mission that you are struck by the banality of life, and how ridiculous petty and pointless disputes like this* seem.
*Some context: David's thinking back to an argument he witnessed an a plane en route to Libya. It was between two people, arguing over how far one of their chairs was pushed back as the other tried to eat. I won't detail what he sees whilst there, but as you can imagine, it's shocking.
Until next week, find me on Twitter, Instagram and YouTube, and have a look at what I’m reading on Goodreads. Ciao!