Short 1: Braver
It’s not easy to get into someone’s life. You have to be relevant, add value, be pleasant or useful in some way.
One of the most obvious examples of this hardship is advertisement. Online ads, in particular, have been under severe fire for several years. People just don’t want them. We have written several browser plugins to get rid of them, for example. We don’t mind that, sometimes, it’s just a poor guy trying to make some money just to pay the servers. Servers that are delivering you a free product he built on his free time. A bit too selfish, yes. Still.
We don’t care. Nor should we.
We are valuable, potentially. We are nothing more than our behaviors, what we choose to do with our time. Time spent looking at some bass ackwards, flashy, and horrible gif is, consequentially, just a waste of character.
We have to be very careful not to allow ourselves to pursue our habits mindlessly. We’ve engraved them in our routine for a very good reason (hopefully), but we must keep ourselves in check. Have you ever stopped to ask yourself: Why do I, every single day, do this? And why do I do it in this particular manner? Even if you can’t really recall what made you sought such comforting repetition, can you still justify it to yourself?
Don’t keep things in your life that you, while looking yourself strait in the eyes, can’t justify.
Exempli gratia. There has been time that I would hang to reading all RSS feeds I found valuable. Even those that only had a good article once. (Ok, if it took just one good article to get into my reading list, it must have been pretty darn good.) My rationale would be that, if this source of information has already produced substantially interesting content, it’ll probably produce some more; and I really want to read good content.
Eventually, being swamped with feeds full of nothing, I had to cut back on the crap I was reading. My method was to, if I caught myself more than once thinking I would have better spent my time looking at lolcats, I would unsubscribe. Unconditionally. I could re-add them later, but not keep them. I figured that, if that source was relevant enough to be followed, it would pop again into my radar (through Twitter, Facebook, or something else).
This has worked flawlessly. I now have more time to spend on discovering stuff that might be really good. I do it in the time I used to spend on making sure that, those who were once beneficial, still are.
And, remember: this is about time, not RSS feeds.
Inspired by Linkages