It's not all about the presents

January 3, 2008 by paul
Filed under: Uncategorized

I was just reading a LifeHacker post called Pare Down Your Online Outlets for Better Focus, which pointed me at an article on 43 Folders entitled Re-evaluating Your Online Commitments; basically it’s about reducing your time wasted spent online. I can relate to that – there’s my blog, LiveJournal, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and a few others that I don’t use as often, but it’s still a big time-sink. Oh, and then there’s all the blogs I read via RSS. It all adds up … to quite a big number in my case.

So I need to reduce my online presence (hence the pun in this post’s title) or at least reduce the time I spend online. Yes, I see the irony in blogging about this, but I often use my blog/LJ (usually in private posts) to reason things out.

What can I cut? Certainly some of the RSS feeds can go – Engadget springs to mind because, as much as I like to read about new toys, it’s pretty high volume and it’s not like I need to get any new toys … for a while. There are also a few F1 feeds which results in a fair bit of duplication, so I can pare those back.

I don’t need both LJ and this blog, surely – it would be simpler for my reader(s) to have just one place to go, and LJ is the no-maintenance option (in the sysadmin sense) so maybe I’ll shut down this site.

My Twitter and Facebook accounts could both be closed down with no real impact – I really got into using them while my blog was down, but again I could use LJ for this … or just skip it completely, because I’m sure no-one cares about the stuff I write on either of them.

I only really started using Flickr recently (again, when our site was down) but I think I’ll continue using it – again, it’s the no-maintenance option for me; I just need to convince friends & family to sign up so they can see the protected photos.

Lastly, LinkedIn: although I don’t use it very much, I need to maintain my professional presence online … in fact I really need to update it and try to find current/ex-colleagues to expand my network. I also started a work-focused blog but it’s never really got going; I might just point my domain at my LinkedIn profile until I decide what to do with it.