Another idea that my partner and I recently came up with is to have more offline weekends. If we go somewhere alone we usually both would listen to an audiobook or podcast. But if we go for a walk or hike together there is no way that we would wear headphones. If the whole weekend is blocked for partner time it is quite easy to do things intentionally, we found.
If we want to read a book (or listen to a book) on the couch later that day we will just do it individually, but intentionally. No pressure to check social media, forums, mail etc.
We are not strict about enforcing the “offline” rule. We would still use hiking apps and map apps to get around a city. But we won’t be posting on social media and briefly checking the feed.
My strategy as well, pretty much. I listen to very few tech podcasts: Two produced by my employers, plus Mac Power users and Gruber’s podcast. So I don’t have the problem of listening to 50 podcasts breaking down the Apple keynotes, for example.
As for the remainder, they’re just a list of podcast episodes I’d like to maybe listen to one day. As of now, that list is up to about 275 episodes. However, only 10 are in my list of episodes I definitely plan to listen to.
Same for my Pocket queue. Almost everything in there is a list of articles I might like to maybe read one day (or videos I might like to watch). I should make a daily thing of reviewing that queue and tagging “must reads,” and then leave the rest alone. I expect, and hope, that there will be days when NOTHING gets tagged as a must-read.
Offline weekends is a great idea. I did zero social media – including MPU forums – when my wife and I were taking our African safaris in June. Set my out-of-office email message to say that I wouldn’t be checking messages and when I returned, I would not be catching up with messages either – I just marked everything as read and archived it. My OoO message for the month of June said: “If you need to contact me, please email me again after July 1.”
During June, I hardly read any news either. Just a few minutes a couple of times a week.
And I hardly missed anything.
I cheated a bit on email: I did check messages a few times a week. I skimmed subject lines and senders and flagged important-looking items for action when I returned home. I was startled by how many messages I received that said “just following up on my earlier email” and “just bumping this to the top of your inbox,” and such. Even though I’d specifically said I wasn’t reading messages! This reinforced my belief that just because someone has found my email address does not mean I owe it to them to read my email, or reply. (It’s different if someone is writing ot me as an individual. I do try to reply to those. But the vast majority of my email is coming from PR people who are one step removed from spammers.)
My work may make me an edge case on this. I’m a journalist. I’m on a lot of PR mailing lists from public relations people trying to get me to write about their clients. It’s one step removed from spam, really. 90% of my email is that. 3% of the PR mail results in article or action – just enough that I can’t afford to ignore it.
I also get a lot of notifications emails from work. Need to at least glance at those.
I also subscribe to a professional tech journalists’ mailing list. I at least check subject lines on those.
And I archive messages rather than delete them. A couple of times a year, I find it useful to search my emails to find a bit of information. The payoff to archiving is very low – but the cost is even lower.