A month without Twitter

In addition to the usual trinity of resolutions* I have decided to give up social media entirely for the month of January.

I’m going to blog about this experience, although given I won’t be able to publicise it, you probably won’t be reading this until the experiment is over.

I am a regular user of Twitter and Facebook. I don’t use anything else except LinkedIn (to publicise a few work-related things). Having decided to abstain pretty much at the last moment, I’ve not done the numbers on how much of my time social media takes up. It tends not to be big runs of time – but it will be a few minutes, several times a day. Certainly more than an hour a day and probably more than two. 

Some quick calculations suggest I tweet about 150 times a month. But I spend a lot  time using both as a news/information source; Twitter through the people I follow and Facebook through pages I like (The Guardian, NPR etc) and which find their way to the top of my news feed. Not all that time is going to be saved, particularly if just I find myself on the Guardian App rather than pulling down articles via Facebook.

Why am I doing this?

Firstly there is that classic ‘alcohol-free month’ approach – just proving to myself that I can stop any time I want. Honest.

Secondly I don’t have a lot of free time and I’d like to think there are better things for me to be doing with it. I’ll try and cover what these might be, and how I get on with them, in future posts.

Third, I am increasingly aware (thanks to the likes of Michael Gove telling me) that I live in a bubble of comfortable ‘metropolitan elitism’ where the news that is curated for me on social media reinforces my existing views. This of course happens with many of the people I meet in real life, but I tend to be far less likely to be involved in political discussions there, and it is much harder to avoid human social interaction. I could have chosen to source my news from Breitbart and the Daily Express for the next month to try and rectify this, but that’s just too painful to seriously contemplate. So this is an attempt to, if not step out of the bubble, at least try to spend a bit less time inflating it.

Finally, the world over the last year or so has been a pretty rubbish place to live. (I mean this in a general sense –  my own life has been really good in 2015/6.) Stepping back from the hate and worry for a month feels like a nice break.

That’s the plan, and 16 hours into the New Year I’m still sticking with it. I’ll post in a couple of days on how things are going.

If you have any views on this, feel free to Tweet me at @rossofpenge. Just don’t expect a reply before February.

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* exercise, alcohol and smoking

Be bloody, bold and resolute...

There seems to be a convention around New Year’s resolutions – that we all make them and then they have gone out of the window by about the 6^th of January. (I am writing this on January 6^th.)

I've tended to do slightly better than this when I look back over the last few years. Largely I think because my resolutions have been practical and easy to break into manageable chunks. Too long in business I guess, with people droning on about SMART* objectives. But it is true that objectives like “be happier” or “make the world a better place” are very hard to judge in a meaningful manner.

This doesn't mean that objectives have to be trivial by any means, it just means that rather than “exercise more” you resolve to “walk for an hour at least twice a week and go to the gym for 40 minutes three times a week”. Then you can plan these in rather than being lost in the overall task. I also believe that positive resolutions are better than negative ones. With a negative (“I will not drink on week nights” being a common one) you lapse once, and then think “Fuck it”**. With a positive it feels easier to me to get back on the horse if a week goes by and you've missed your target.

I have been thinking about resolutions for 2015, and I have been struggling. Yes people, my life is, in the words of the sage of modern times James Blunt, ‘brilliant’ and I have nothing to change. That was ironic, by the way.

It’s more that I have had a few years where it’s been easy to say “I really need to do that”, or “I want to do that” and they are quite big things. But this year there isn't a big thing that is readily apparent to me. I'm at least broadly happy (and in most cases very happy) with life, lifestyle, exercise, hobbies, job etc. Yes, I could for example be a bit more productive at times in the office, but that feels like a nebulous thing to try and tweak. But I don’t feel I want to take on a new musical challenge this year, nor do I want to change job, flat etc.

So should I just skip the resolutions thing completely? That feels wrong – I think it is good to have goals/areas to improve. I guess that’s the heart of the issue – my mind sees the black and white definition that you are either ‘improving’ or you are ‘drifting’, and I don’t really want to feel I am drifting *Insert cliche here about shark swimming forward or drowning etc.*

So what I have decided is that 2015 will be a year where I am going to investigate and try some new things. I am going to aim to try six new activities (new being something that has formed no measurable part of my daily life in the last twenty years) over the year. I am going to give each one of them a decent go. And if I then decide that they have added nothing to my life, or are merely using up time, I will let them go and move on. If they become part of the day-to-day then that is because they have shown themselves as having value.

I don’t have the full list yet; this will build over the year but I will start keeping a mental list of possibles. But I have the first two:

1. I listen to a few podcasts which interview successful people in their fields – they try to get to what is common amongst them – looking for a recipe I suppose***. It has struck me that a very large proportion of these interviewees spend a small part of each day doing what I really don’t want to call mediation, but for want of a better word am going to call meditation. Sometimes this is the full Buddhist version. More often it is putting some time aside on a regular basis to think about what you are going to do, and how you are going to achieve it. So I am going to spend the rest of January and February trying to build this into my schedule.
2. I am going to dip a toe into the world of MOOCs. Massive Open Online Courses that is. Not MOOGs, which are either cool synthesisers, or one of these:

(those of you not around in the early 80’s should just gloss over that – you don’t need to know).

I am going to find something that looks interesting, or possibly even useful, and sign up for it and do it.

Both these two are things that I need to find out more about. And I imagine I will have a few dead-ends or false starts on the way. But that’s part of the fun. I will report back.

*Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-specific, in case you a) didn’t know, and b) care.

** OK, you may not think this, but I probably would.

*** If you want lots of these in one place – try the Tim Ferriss Show – on iTunes. He’s sometimes a little smug and self-important for English tastes (in other words he's American), but does talk to a huge range of people who are successful, rather than celebrities, and who are generally interesting.