Personal Goals and Guidelines for Technology: 2018 Edition

I have written this post about twenty times over, but it keeps turning into a rant against notifications, social media, digital assistants, and Blue Bell ice cream.

So instead of getting into the "why" (for now), I am going to simply document some goals I have for my site and guidelines for how I approach technology in general... in list form, since prose kept becoming a sixty paragraph ramble.

My Site 

  1. Allow me to log in with my site, with IndieAuth by March
  2. Implement webmentions by April
  3. Create a way to post short notes to my site, and syndicate to Twitter, Mastodon, etc. by May
  4. Post an article at least once a month, adding more general thoughts on technology and beyond in addition to the typical technical articles
  5. Rebuild Projects page to show selected client work and CodePens instead of older hybrid apps that do not actually reflect my current priorities/strengths by February

General Personal Technology Guidelines 

In no particular order:

  1. Don’t access Facebook at all on my phone, even the browser. This is admittedly easier for me to do because I removed the Facebook app three years ago and never got tied into Facebook Messenger.
  2. Keep Twitter app off my phone. Limit usage to desktop-only.
  3. Do not allow notifications on anything but texts and calls on my phone.
  4. Provide a look of complete and total disdain and/or sadness to every person who looks at their Apple Watch during a one on one conversation with me and then asks me to repeat what I was saying during the last 20 seconds of our one on one conversation.
  5. Don’t atually do the previous guideline, but do be honest with people when they are effectively wasting my time because they got a notification that their next meeting is still at noon.
  6. Go all in on RSS, and create a system that allows me to read the previous day’s news and web articles as a morning or evening newspaper/digest.
  7. Be vocal in my web presence about issues that are important to me. I don’t have the biggest online presence, but it is still a platform I can use to speak out against hate, bigotry, and inequality.
  8. Unplug all the Alexas and Google Homes in the office’s meeting rooms when I enter them... because why are they needed in there... or at all?
  9. Do not use my phone in lines, at restaurant tables, or any place where I am doing it just because I am "bored"

But why? 

I might dive into some specifics of my guidelines in the future (a lot of people question me on my approach to notification and Facebook in particular), but for now the overall reason is I enjoy simplicity. I get no joy out of scrolling through Facebook, for example. I’d much rather subscribe to a couple newspapers and donate to public radio and television and focus on their content. But even then, on my own time and not just to kill time.