Remember metafilter? Or Friendfeed, or de.licio.us?

You are a filter. Your mind is eliminating distractions or creating them. The inflow of data and images is overwhelming to our brains. So, our brains are determining (instantaneously) to ALLOW or DISALLOW the stream. When you’re doom-scrolling on IG or TikTok or FB, you are streaming a lot of crap into your data stream. Is that what you want to add to your L³M? (Large Living Language Model)

Learning to filter my inputs has been a ninja skill allowing me to focus on what’s important in my life. What is important in my life?

• family
• creative time
• down time
• entertainment time
• social time
• health time
• spiritual time

Each of these TIMES are required in my life. At different points in my journey, my priorities have shifted. What about yours? What am I missing? What parts of your time are you waisting on social media, dumb tv, dumb inputs? If you are spending a lot of time injecting *fluff* into your LLLM, you are dumbing down your own creative model, your language model, your precious time.

Here are a few tricks I’ve used to recapture some of my alt time.

TV/News – I use an RSS feed of the NYTimes and open Google TV in the browser, and from that one screen I can see the top three channels: CNN, MSNBC, Comedy Channel. I can read the screen crawlers of the moment and settle my own fear that something important is happening. We don’t want to miss events that will affect us. What we should miss, however, is events that will NOT affect us, or more importantly, that WE CANNOT AFFECT. (See The Serenity Prayer for more guidance.)

Social Media – I deleted FB and LI from my phone and my browser quick links. If I want to jump on FB for a social injection, I do it intentionally. I no longer open FB or LI when I’m opening and looking for new information. That’s what I want off social media: new (relevant) data.

Capturing New Ideas – I use a text editor for most of my capture these days. I prefer Sublime. I’m also a huge Miro fan, when I need to add visuals and data stacks. I also love PowerPoint for quick visualizations.

Output – I publish several websites. I’ve been a single-parent blogger for over 14 years. A tech blogger for 15 years. And a writer for my entire biographical life. I still remember the cover of my first science fiction novel. Exigent Langing. I liked the word. I think this was seventh grade. The same year I discovered Ben Bova and decided to become a sci-fi writer.

And PAUSE.

Pause. I am learning to pause a lot in my daily life. Just stop for a minute or more and reset your plans. How am I doing? How is my energy? What do I need? What do I want to work?