Apple News URLs — or at least the constantly changing effort to get to the actual URL of a story posted there — are one of the reasons I quit using Apple News. The other was a general lack of control of the experience: You can choose topics and sites to follow, but you’re never sure what content surfaces and why. If you block a site, it blows holes in your feed that Apple somewhat sulkily insists on informing you are there. And this time, having read Apple News daily for about a week, another reason is how much content in the somewhat curated Apple News experience is just affiliate linking.

I went to college for journalism and I worked in online media for close to 15 years. I am sympathetic to media outlets and understand a lot of the challenges they face. I trudged through a year of layoffs during the dot com bust, and then went through a bunch of austerity measures in 2008-2009. I experienced the clammy feeling of working for a tech journalism network that got snapped up by a “performance marketing” company to do lead generation masquerading as journalism.

I do not think affiliate linking is an ethical answer to the sustainability challenges online journalism faces.

You can hear the rationalizing in headlines that solemnly inform you that some gadget or another is “the lowest price we’ve ever seen,” as if you’re being done a special service. I did an informal count on a few sites Apple News pushes and saw upwards of 20-30 percent of the content pushing affiliate links.

You can see sites that painstakingly track the release cadence of companies like Apple and would quickly advise you to hold off on a purchase in any un-subsidized content try to push fire sales on old tech. They know it’s hitting the market at that price precisely because companies are clearing inventory to make room for the soon-to-arrive thing these same sites would advise you to wait for if you can. That isn’t ethical, even if you squint and try to act as if the pitch is targeting savvy trailing-edge buyers.

And you can see a kind of coverage for Kickstarter/IndieGoGo stuff that doesn’t bother to mention that the product they’re “reporting” on doesn’t actually exist yet. Click through to read a “review” and you realize they got to handle a prototype, if that, but there’s the referrer link to sites that are sometimes interesting storefronts, but are also sometimes just casinos if your crowdfunded entrepreneur flakes.

The thing is, these same sites are completely right to say, “well what, then?” Everyone is running ad blockers, and understanding how to install a paywall-subverting bookmarklet is pretty much a basic adult life skill at this point. I don’t know what the answer is, and don’t think pointing to boutique sites like Daring Fireball is any kind of answer.

When I sit and think it through, what I come up with is that it stops being a content, delivery, tech, or logistics problem and reveals itself to be a basic problem of economic organization: A lot of the sites I wish would knock off the affiliate link junk are run by people who used to be working journalists who felt they had to strike out on their own to do good work, or who simply got downsized. To do what they love and make a living, something has to give. It’d be nice if we were economically organized to let them do that without having to resort to the hustleification of everything. It’s only the market “working” if your conception of a working market is something that helps Apple and Dell efficiently clear obsolete backstock, or helps Amazon clear more handling fees for drop-shipped, ripoff junk.

Anyhow, I’m deleting Apple News again. Personal blogs and non-commercial social feeds work fine, and take way less energy than reading past all the commercial content, losing time to “reviews” and “reporting” about nonexistent products, or wondering if the “top 5” things are actually their assessment of the top 5, or if the actual top 5 are something else, but not available on a site with an affiliate program.

Newport’s take on how to do that starts from what I guess you could call a naive footing, dumping everything and then considering it without a lot of preconception. I think that is fine, but I’d been giving a lot of this some thought already, have done a few declutters in the past, and had heard Newport talk before reading his book, so I colored outside the lines and skipped a few steps with some parts, but kept a few things from his approach, too.

I have a few things in mind:

I want to radically pare back the number of tools hanging from my belt. I keep a lot of things hanging around for this edge case or that, this possible scenario or that. I decided to reduce as much as possible by getting rid of things that repeated each other. For instance, I like Ulysses well enough but it repeats other things and it has a subscription fee. So, yes, it can post to micro.blog and has a few other tricks, but none that I need. I’ve also bounced back and forth between RSS readers for whatever reason, but Feedly’s native app works great for my workflow.

I’ve also built up a lot of papercuts with the things I do use regularly, such as:

• How do I block a site in Feedly so that I can keep a little serendipity with a few eclectic sources without constantly bumping into the same site with a paywall I’ll never click through?
• How do I get something into an Obsidian inbox using a shortcut to keep me from pecking around inside Obsidian and ultimately forgetting the fleeting note I wanted to create?
• Why does micro.blog pick the images it does to send when I crosspost to Twitter?
• Can I get more folders in SaneBox without paying more? How much would I have to pay to get more?
• I’ve got good automated note import into Obsidian, but am I linking ideas and and concepts adequately? (A: No.) How can I fix that?

And I want to do the sort of core thing, which is unplug my brain from all the social media inputs and stuff that doesn’t feel nutritious.

The more I thought about it all, the more I realized there was a project there. Turns out that trying to be more intentional means doing stuff like writing it all down and prioritizing.

Fixing Todos

So, realizing I needed to capture tasks, I started by cleaning up my todo situation. I’ve been living in a few places over the past few years. I recently tried to retrench on Apple’s Reminders because it has gotten pretty good, but it turns out not good enough. It’s great that you can nest reminders under each other, it is terrible that when you painstakingly set up a morning routine with subtasks and then turn on recurrence, the only thing that actually reoccurs is the parent item.

I also gave Obsidian a shot, on the premise that it is pretty much org-mode except with Markdown, an actually good mobile app, and no dependency on Emacs. It is great, but it also has some challenges in terms of making quick entries, and the task management stuff that would take it to the next level has a lot of the same issues most plaintext todo systems have in terms of awkward and visually cluttery metadata. org-mode does a great job of hiding or restyling that stuff, but you’re still living in Emacs, and the power comes at the cost of a complex and sometimes brittle pile of configuration code and stability-threatening Emacs extensions.

What else? Omnifocus, Todoist, Remember the Milk, Trello, and Workflowy all suggested themselves. I won’t go into why not for each, but it came down to “want Apple-native, a good mobile experience, decent capture, subtasking, recurrence, decent in-task notes, and integration with my calendar.”

So, I went with Things. I’ve had a license for years, I’ve always preferred it to Omnifocus for its relative visual calm.

I could have kept my old Things tasks around and cleared them all out, but I decided to just wipe and start over, and borrowed a page from Getting Things Done by doing an initial braindump into my new trusted system (for tasks, not ideas … that’s Obsidian, but I’ll get into that some day). A lot of the things I knew I’d want to get to in my digital declutter came out during that dump. I made myself sit still, get everything out in its simplest form without trying to schedule, label, or organize.

Once I did the braindump I did start looking for organizing principles. Things has the whole “Areas” concept, so “Personal” and “Work” presented themselves as obvious candidates for top-level. I also added a “Meta” area, which I’ll get to.

So I hucked everything into either “Personal” or “Work” then started sorting into projects, subtasks, and tags.

The “Declutter” project had a lot of items, so I took advantage of Things’ ability to create headings, and broke the project into:

• Tools
• Services
• Media Outlets
• Practices
• Social Media

Into each I put all the things I use or have around, all the papercuts I’ve thought about, and all the questions I wanted to answer:

• What do you need a break from?
• What do you need to do to be intentional about this thing? Is that practical or useful?
• When you adopted this thing, what aspirational idea did you have about it?

Daily/Weekly/Monthly Routine

Recurrence in my todo tool is important to me because I want to codify a daily routine I’ve had on and off over the years, starting back when I was stationed at Ft. Bragg and started and ended the day with a pen, a legal pad, and a list of tasks:

• Morning: Write down deliverables. Start doing things.
• Evening: Make sure you crossed everything off you managed to get done. Tear off the sheet, copy over the undone stuff to tomorrow’s list and leave the pad front and center on your desk when you shut down for the day.

Since then, I’ve tended to move todos into a digital tool, but that list is just part of the daily page.

For starters, there are some prompts for morning and evening:

• What are the three most important things today?
• What are you most concerned about right now?
• What are you most happy about right now?
• What happened today?
• What went well today?
• What could have been improved today?

I also have tasks for each morning:

• Reviewing todos and blocking time in my calendar to get to them.
• Reviewing places where a deliberate break will be a good idea.
• Reviewing the day for manageability and pushing things out that aren’t time sensitive if I need some space.
• Review my email inbox

My weekly and monthly kickoffs are pretty similar in shape and intent: Try to predict where I’ll need time or space and get ahead of the week or month.

To support this routine, I tweaked Sanebox to send me work email digests at the beginning and end of the day so I can quickly sweep through and bulk archive or flag things.

Writing it down

Getting my todos straightened out and having a daily routine to stick to gave me a safe space to think in, so I turned to Obsidian and set up a few pages to write down everything I was thinking about.

I’ve got a tentative Zettelkasten-like folder and document structure using a few plugins:

• Daily pages as a recipient of fleeting notes. Fleeting notes are meant to be ephemeral, so I could have gone with a lot of things, but I also added …
• … the Lumberjack plugin, which allows me to make Shortcut actions to do quick capture under a “Fleeting Notes” heading on my current daily page. The action lives as an icon on the dock of my iPad and iPhone, and I can get at it from the task bar on my Mac.
• Zettelkasten numbering for permanent notes
• Readwise to import highlights from Pocket, Kindle, and web clippings into a “Literary Notes” folder

Thanks to Things and Obsidian having URL schemes, it’s possible to link back and forth between the two apps, so my Things declutter project can link back to the index page for the writing I’m doing about that project in Obsidian and vice versa.

Progress So Far

That’s a lot of table-setting, but I had some downtime today so I was able to dig in on some of the actual tasks in the project: Unsubscribing to media, deleting apps, asking questions on support forums or via help forms to address papercuts, disconnecting auto-posting tools, paring down follow lists, fixing papercuts as I was given answers or figured things out for myself, comparing features on tools in the inventory.

Something I never used with Things before but now really appreciate is the Logbook area, where completed tasks go. I’ve adopted the practice, when a task is about answering a question or learning something, to include the answer in the notes. I really like being able to end the day by going back to the Logbook and seeing everything I checked off.

Now for the hard but nice part

All of this was to get me into a place where I can unplug from social media for a month.

Things I’ll stop doing:

• Looking in on social media.
• Posting anything to social media, including automated stuff.
• Adding any new digital tools, even just to play with them.
• My nightly pre-bedtime YouTube binge.

Things I’ll keep doing:

• Reading and keeping notes

• Writing and posting small entries about what I read

• Taking pictures and posting them to my blog

• Writing about my declutter:

  • What do you need a break from?
  • What do you need to do to be intentional about this thing? Is that practical or useful?
  • What aspirational ideas do you have about this thing?

• Keep in touch with people over email, texts, Signal, etc. Hopefully even more.

• Reach out to people with whom social media is my only real contact and make sure there’s a way to stay in touch. I don’t see a bright future for Facebook in all this.

Things I’m adding:

• A daily journal practice.
• A real effort to maintain a Zettelkasten for my reading and writing. This feels intimidating for some reason. The system is easy, but I’ve only recently restarted my reading habits and I’m curious about what will emerge. I’ll be sure to document whether I’ve become an idiot.

“… I often get asked about ‘Breadtube,’ a loose constellation of socialish vloggers and streamers, and about Contrapoints and Hasan Piker in particular. For many, they offer an easy onramp for socialist community. The trouble is that I don’t know what exactly I’m supposed to react to. Breadtube and those in its orbit appear to be entertainers first, and typical of entertainers they’re longer on passion than on coherence. Which would be OK, if such coherence lay in some larger socialist project. The problem is that there is no real socialist movement in 21st-century American politics. All we have are entertainers.”

The rest is an interesting, prickly read and branding exercise.

As I’ve picked up my reading and listening I’ve been worrying at a related idea that’s still not completely formed, so I’ll keep this brief:

As I’ve tried to broaden my reading, listening, and viewing, I’ve seen a pretty healthy outraged left industrial complex. It has staked out broadly pro-socialism, anti-Democratic Party, anti-liberal, anti-“woke” territory. The thing that really strikes me about it is the way it behaves mostly like any other political entertainment entity across the political spectrum, stoking outrage and going after the center from the left. One vlog I found tries to look sort of like a cable news talk show, only with a copy of Manufacturing Consent stood up on a shelf behind one of the hosts in a way that I can only describe as “anti-casual,” and I think that might be because the Biden-bashing, Covid-truther, pro-Rogan, anti-“woke” stuff might confuse someone without a helpful indicator that no, the hosts think Chomsky is cool so just go with it.

The content and format are pretty tedious unto themselves. Maybe the more interesting thing about it is that all of these “attack liberals from the left” outrage merchants are plainly trying to serve a market niche of some sort and seem to be doing okay at it. Like, there’s an actual market for attacking liberals from the left that can be serviced and people can make a living at it, and that says something interesting about where political sentiment might be right now … something interesting about what people are hungry for.

The bad part of it is that a lot of it recreates the stuff we used to rightly condemn right-wing talk radio for: It cuts corners, resorts to ad hominem, and appeals to feelings of disgust and anger. Its interpretation of the mood in the market it is trying to serve is that anger will sell just fine, and it doesn’t care who is alienated as it goes about serving that market.

The personal line I am walking comes from a place of opposition to a lot of stuff going on “out there” that has abandoned any attempt to bring people along, or call them in, so the left outrage merchants are as odious to me as the right-wing ones you can find on Fox or wherever.

So, I’m all paid up on my subscription to Jacobin, with its very square, not particularly outraged socialist nerds. I enjoy Catherine Liu and Thomas Frank. When I see Adolph Reed get attention in The New Yorker, I feel the same way I felt when someone from my home town made it big on Star Search.

Very wholesome. Not super angry.