Taking Back Control: Finding Focus and Choice on the Internet in 2023

Thu, 09 Feb 2023 08:51:28 -0600

I’ve had enough.

Over the last year, I have finally decided that all the attention manipulation, the never ending ‘signals’, and the 3500 interrupters that my phone and other devices create each day is too much to bear.

I find I no longer casually or carefully read articles – let alone books! My days have become filled with a blend or oscillations between some variant of ‘doom scrolling’ on pop-news sites and trying to do 100 things at once while 1000 other things beg me to give them my attention for just a moment.

Along with an ADHD diagnoses I received earlier this year, I decided I had to take action to regain my sense of agency with media and rebuild the ability to focus – I want to feel in control and whelmed with the tools and services I have. I want to be deliberate about what I consume.

In this article, we’ll talk about different tools, use cases, and methods I’ve found to be useful in a number of areas to regain your sanity and feel in control of your digital consumption habits.

There’s a lot of great stuff out there in 2023, but it seems like most of the funded, advertised, most visible things are not the great stuff.

Writing, Note-taking, & Task Tools

Writing regularly is hard, especially since you’re likely busy with other, non writing related things. This takes a lot of dedication/focus/attention, but can be really valuable whether you’re writing for others or just yourself.

Some of the tools I’ve found helpful to make writing easier and encourage regular writing:

Obsidian

Obsidian is a fantastic note-taking program and is extensible enough, with a large enough plugin community, that it can do a ton and is super customizable.

I had tried to get into using Emacs org-mode for all kinds of daily things and notes for a long time, but found it was too compelling to sit and endlessly try and customize it. I had even unsuccessfully tried mind map style note-taking in Emacs through org-roam. For me, Obsidian strikes the perfect balance of usability and customizability.

Today, I take all my long form notes in obsidian, have a daily note (which I highly recommend) setup, and use it to write drafts for this blog.

In the future, I’d like to set up a ‘life dashboard’ in obsidian using APIs and dataview, but I will need to get better at data entry/hygiene and someone else will need to develop a better smartwatch.

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Typora

Typora is the best markdown editor I’ve ever used. For years, I had tried to move to markdown and used many eventually abandonware web apps. Nothing ever stuck.

While the customizability of Obsidian makes it better as your notes HQ, Typora can be setup to minimize distractions and, crucially, manage rules for where pasted images are stored/moved to.

If you run a static blog or other complex markdown site and find the image/styling piece fails to live up to markdown’s promise of ease, check it out.

Bookmarklet in Chrome

For quick notes or a simple daily list, I’ve found just being able to open a new tab and write down notes is super useful.

If you search around, you can find lots of examples. Finding one that uses localStorage to save the content in case you accidentally close the tab is super helpful. Below is the bookmarklet I currently use.