Get Outta My Feed!
I made a new year's resolution.
But not the usual kind. This one has been an absolute a breeze to commit to. It is soon to become the gift that keeps on giving! My goal was to achieve way more focus in my daily work life.
I wanted to eliminate the massive amount of noise that drains my attention each day.
It all started with an attempt to better manage my incoming e-mail.
Oh, what a revelation! I did that by super-charging my message filters. I had been using them before, but now they are set on overdrive. These filters automatically send incoming messages to a folder of your choice. If you don’t know how your email client handles them, seriously, it's really worth it to learn.
I now keep the message filters tool persistent on my desktop. If I spot a mail I don’t want to read, I zap the sender's name into the filter, and whoosh, it automatically goes into a separate folder before ending up in my inbox. When I actually do want to review that mail, one click takes me directly there.
Result: The signal increased dramatically, and the noise, ah, is greatly diminished.
It will still take a bit more training to separate all this unwanted noise from my incoming mails, but, I´m well on the way. What a gift it is to have just a few important mails, right in front of me.
But then I became emboldened.
Like many, I have a love hate relationship with LinkedIn. Probably, you do too. I see it as kind of necessary evil, until something better pops up. Like with Facebook we are mainly a slave to the feed. And yes, you can tailor each post that pops up, but, sincerely, I was trying to win time and focus, not train another damn algorithm.
These days I find LinkedIn completely parasitic.
I’m sucked into an endless parade of postings, the grand master of which is some unfathomable algorithm that constantly brings up content that falls into categories I can characterize as follows:
You're impressing me. Thanks for that. You’ve amplified my worst feelings of underachievement! Obviously I’m not as clever as you.
It’s content that is just completely irrelevant. Thanks for those needless neuron synapses, LinkedIn!
Or it's content from people you have not seen or talked to in many years. Sure, always lovely to know what you're doing, sure, but sincerely, as the hilarious late John Pinette would have said in a loud hissing voice "Get out of the line!".
Get outta my feed!
Nowadays I´m talking to myself in a similarly annoyed voice, "get outta my feed"! Of course, Pinette was referring to the line at the restaurant buffet, but sincerely, the content that is served up, and which we are ALL guilty of posting, just sucks the life out of you.
It’s not your fault.
I should say, none of this is your fault. There is no way to know or control what the algorithm is going to serve up. We all have a (reasonably) good intention when we post. OK, well, that may be a bit over-generous. But truly, it’s just that the algorithm is surely not perfect. And it never will be.
Then I did another clever thing.
I set a bookmark to bypass the home page feed. This bookmark goes direct to my own profile page, instead of to the feed. Ooh, I’m really winning more time. And then I took it a step further: the notifications.
Yes, of course, I already had disabled most notifications on my phone. But notifications are tricky. Even if you turn them off, there are a million flavors, and you have to turn them off one by one. Evil Eye to the sites who require you to log in to manage notifications you don’t want in the first place! And of course they are a plague with any apps you might download, because they usually have notifications turned on by default.
It’s a real wonder how we get anything done.
I don’t know about you, but I have only so many button presses (and zoom calls) left remaining in my life, and I would rather reserve them for clients, and then have the energy for my family and other interests.
It's important to stay focused on business. What wins you new business or what sustains your business is the only thing that matters. So figure out what those things are. Whether it be making new business connections, desk research or whatever it is you need to focus on, lower the noise to signal ratio without a moment to lose. Life is short (just as it was, unfortunately, for John Pinette).
These days I also use focus music.
You Tube is a great resource for that. This blog post is courtesy of some nice deep focus music I found.
Now all I have to do is figure out how to permanently block Google from calling my Skype number to verify a business address, something that´s none of their business, anyway. I get something like 5-10 calls a day, all from different numbers. Unblockable. Now if I could only crack that…