Digital Jubilee

Back in 2012, I came across an article (probably via Lifehacker) by Frank Chimero that referred to a practice that he called a "Digital Jubilee", based on the old testament practice of the "Year of Jubilee".

I won't belabour the point here, because this isn't a new concept. I just want to share what this looks like for me.

I've done some version of this every year since then and it's a great way to start the year fresh in the digital world. So, in no particular order:

• Trim my follows on social networks (as of this year, that only means Mastodon). This means keeping all the folks I regularly interact with, maybe some of the ones I just love to read and if there are any I'm not sure of, off they go. Sometimes I use an "archive" list so I can see if people I end up following again were jubilee-d but that's not critical to the process (though it might be more likely with mutuals).
• Take an axe to my RSS feeds. It doesn't always get rid of a lot because I love keeping up to date using RSS. But it's worth asking the question "would I really be missing out if I didn't read this information here?"
• I don't need to worry about clearing my email because I run a pretty tight inbox-zero ship. But I will spend most of January keeping an eye on newsletters and feeling free to "unsubscribe".
• Trim my podcasts a little. I probably won't need to do much this year because when my queued episodes got constantly over 20 hours earlier this year I cut out most of them. But I'll take this opportunity to see if I can do a bit more.
• Have a look through my Pocket list and see if there's anything I'm really never going to get to. It's not stupidly long so there won't be much but who knows what next year will look like.
• Check my todo.txt list to see if there's anything on there that should really move to someday/maybe. Perhaps if I did my weekly reviews properly that wouldn't even be a thing. But right now, it is.
• Get rid of unused apps on my phone or tablet.

There are some things I don't feel (at least right now) the need to "Jubilee". Email, as I said before. Culling my video or music files. Clearing out my Downloads directory (that's another inbox-zero thing with me anyway). I'm sure there are probably more I should be dealing with but this lot improves things a lot for me, so will certainly do for now.

Happy New Year to all...

2019-12-30