Tweaking Digital Habits...

As part of Digital Detox, I’ve been trying to develop better habits when it comes to my interactions with technology. Given so much of my time every day - for many things - centers on technology, I wondered if I was being efficient and fair to myself in my habits.

Sure enough: I wasn’t.

My browser tabs were out of control. My email inboxes weren’t much better.

So I tried adopting a multi-window browser workflow: one would house commonly-used services and other resources (GMail, Board Game Arena, Pandora, etc.) while another would be ephemeral, with tabs existing only as long as needed while I read them, made notes, acted upon their contents, etc.

Well, that didn’t work.

I adopted Obsidian for making and linking notes, tagging them for projects, etc. That quickly turned into a digital garden - this site - where I could consider the maturity of a thought or article as I worked on them over time…

OK. It helped with my bookmarks, for sure. Not yet with my daily habits. I need to actually make a point to iterate over tabs: anything actionable needed to be done and closed while anything needed for reference needed to be tagged and closed out. Otherwise I’d either never go back to the tab (intending to, some day, but…) or wind up being a portal to rabbit-hole into any time it tickled my fancy as I Ctrl-TABbed through the ever-expanding row of tabs.

Today it was email.

I’ve been using Betterbird for a while in an attempt to have at least one browser tab out of the rotation (GMail) but still needing a portal to email.

It’s…not a good email client. The search functionality is bad. There are other things I don’t like about it (and many things I do; the colored tags are great) but search is kind of key for me. At least…for how I tend to use email.

That’s the root of the issue, really: how I tend to use email. Like browser tabs, I’d keep emails around for reference or as a to-do or…but realistically, if a message dropped out of view, it was essentially gone. Whatever my intentions were, they were moot: if it couldn’t be seen, it likely wouldn’t be acted on.

I had to realize: why do that? It doesn’t help anyone. It’s a terrible system…and what system is it? An archive? That’s there, already, and GMail’s search functions are really good. Communication system? If so, I should communicate as expected and delete or archive the triggering email.

An off-hand comment made me realize: email is a to-do list other people can add to. And I was using it as one for myself, too. If I searched for how many emails were send from me to me, it wouldn’t look good.

I knew about the 4 D’s - Do, Delegate, Defer or Delete - but the habit never stuck for long when it came to email. I decided to be more deliberate.

Today, I set up Obsidian to have a morning kick-off note which would have ~3 things I intend or need to do (as Tasks), plus sections for Tasks needing Delegation (and/or where they were delegated to) and Deferral (including when for). At the end of the day, hopefully all email was dealt with and I could review my intended tasks alongside anything else that came in throughout the day that had to be dealt with one way or another. If anything needed to be carried forward, I could note that.

Hopefully, all browser tabs could be closed and I’d be at Inbox Zero for email.

We’ll see how well it works.

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Tools

The setup I’m trying consists of: - mail syncs - mbsync (maildir sync from Fastmail, etc.) - gmi / gmailieer (API mail sync from GMail) - gmi pushes local changes first, so updates to tags are pushed to GMail before anything’s synced back down (removing the “inbox” tag effectively archives a message, for isntance) - notmuch (mail indexer) - https://usher.dev/posts/2021-03-17-my-email-setup/ - alot (mail user agent) - Obsidian (PKM / digital garden)

Workflow - tabs

1. Browser tabs are reviewed
   1. End of the day, end of the week or whenever convenient
2. Anything relevant to a project gets added in Obsidian as a note tagged for the project/category
   1. i.e. recipes might just have the URL added to the note with a ‘recipe’ tag or be more fully fleshed-out as a full note as a recipe card/etc.
   2. Some things might have their own templates to make presentation nicer or more useful with various properties broken out
      1. “Songs to learn” have their own template allowing for artist, album, music style, etc. to be captured in a structured manner for easier reuse and retrieval
      2. Beer recipes include things like IBUs, ABV, etc.
3. Anything generally interesting gets tagged as ‘inbox’ for later categorization or consumption
4. Anything else is just closed.

Workflow - email

1. mbsync checks all email accounts and syncs new mail down
2. notmuch is run to index anything new
3. alot is used for quick mail categorization
   1. Do
   2. Defer (to when)
      1. A Task is created in Obsidian with the Deferral date
   3. Delegate
      1. A Task is created in Obsidian with who/what it was Delegated to
   4. Delete
4. Obsidian can then be used to flesh out any new notes/tasks.