For the past week I have unsubscribed from every advertisement, notification, update, newsletter that I receive in my gmail inbox.  I found myself spending several minutes a day just deleting this stuff from my inbox.  Except for a few newsletters (I unsubscribed to those too), none of the other content provides any real value.  Instead of receiving push notifications, I’m setting everything that I am interested in reading/keeping up-to-date on as a pull.  That is, I’ll go out and seek the web site or newsletter at a scheduled time that I set.

I’ve already done this with LinkedIn.  I’ve signed out of my account.  I use a password manager so I cannot easily sign in without opening that first.  I’ve set a reminder for Sunday to login and catch up on LinkedIn notifications.  1X per week is enough.  I plan to do the same with catching up on news and reading stuff I’m generally interested in.  I’m going to limit these two activities to 1X per week too.

The rest of my ‘online time’ will be either learning (taking courses, not watching YouTube which is another account I need to log out of and schedule a viewing time), reading books, writing, or working on projects.