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Attention is all that you have and you become what you give your attention to. The problem is that focusing on the right things can be difficult because our world is full of distractions. To realize how easily distracted you might be, check the amount of notifications you’ve received on your phone within the last 24 hours.
Phone notifications might seem harmless but when happening frequently enough, it’s hard to ever give a task your full attention. This becomes increasingly true when you start evaluating which apps are constantly vying for your attention: YouTube, X, TikTok, and others hardly ever notify you of something that immediately requires your attention.
Slowly but surely I’ve started realizing the effects that this has had on my own attention. I hate feeling like I’m not deeply focused on a single task and I’ve realized phone is the biggest impediment to that.
To combat this I’ve started leveraging two things, Ferryman and Newsboat, solve my problems of creating content and consuming content respectively.
As a content creator it’s important that I can post content on all my platforms. But traditionally, every time I’d navigate to a platform to post, I’d risk losing my intention of posting and scroll the platform instead. Because of this, I now intentionally post all my content directly through Ferryman.
This allows me to quickly and easily post to all my platforms and avoid losing additional time to consuming random algorithmicly served content.
To consume content, I use Newsboat, an RSS feed reader that I navigate via the terminal. What I love about Newsboat is that I can pick and choose the content that I’d like to consume across all my favoriate platforms and read and view it in a single location. This inevitably saves me from going down random rabbit holes on platforms like YouTube and losing countless hours to reading and watching content that I almost unconciously clicked on.
Not only can I consume all the content I choose in a single place, but I can also update and customize Newsboat to my heart’s content since it supports scripting. Thanks to my customizing, I can download videos and articles to read offline, organize content into different lists like Starred and Favorites, be notified when specific creators release something, navigate creator’s YouTube playlists, and more.
If you’re losing countless hours online to content you don’t feel good about consuming I highly recommend trying both Ferryman and Newsboat to create and consume your content.
Your attention is the most important thing that you have; be careful what you’re giving it to. If you don’t like where it’s going, find systems that help you correct that. Thankfully, I’ve found mine!
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