I was just talking about this with someone this past weekend. For me, it has been removing most “smart” features from my phone.
- I’ve disabled Chrome, so I can no longer access the internet.
- I’ve disabled the “google” app, so I don’t have a back-door to the internet, as that seems to have a browser built in. This also disables voice to text, which I never used anyway.
- No social media, games, etc. of any kind.
The only thing I use my phone now is calling/texting, navigation, music, a calendar, and a notes app. It’s taken me a long time to get here, almost 3 years at this point, but being able to take my phone out, use it for the one intentional thing I need, then put it away… It’s so liberating. I use Olauncher, which is a minimal text-based home screen, and it also tracks your daily screen-time and displays it on the home-screen. I’m down to around 30-45 minutes MAX of screen time per day. Most days its 15 or below.
If you use the F-Droid repository, you can install the fubo keyboard, which does voice-to-text locally, through a whisper client.
It is different than the Google client, but it’s good enough, and the fact that it increases and respects privacy makes me much more happy.
Working from home. I didn’t realize until the pandemic how energy draining the office really is. Once I started working from home I found out quickly that I had energy to spare for evening activities - while also being more productive at work.
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Saving time and money. I sold my car in 2020 and saved thousands of euros. It’s unbelievable how much money owning a car costs you.
Commuting through traffic stresses me out. I didn’t realize how much it was stressing me out until I stopped the routine. I realized I was coming home every day stressed and irritable from it, making my free time after work less enjoyable. WFH changed all of that for the better.
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I switched jobs 2 years ago. It was mainly because of Return To Office, but really because the incapable git - installed as manager by the incapable fuckwit installed as CIO by the meddling narcissist CFO who organized a coup to depose the former I.T command chain who kept saying no to things like kicking I.T out of the fancier newer offices and gutting security budget and capital expense for HA projects, really really - really was a harbinger of shitty things to come. RTO to a dank, funky, hot, bright, loud, cramped sexist* hell was a great motivator to quit, but the underlying cause was the outlook when seeing this keystone kops management in action.
So yeah, switched to a company that went from 100% WFO to 100% WFH on CoViD Day 1 with no clue how, but a desire for business continuity, so it coped and adapted, and then sold off the office space. I’m on a gov pension plan as a mere Senior flunky in a contract house, I know some great people from past gigs and respect them, and my boss is gonna retire at the top of her career in about 3 years. The workload is easy but dumb, and that’s entirely okay: I have this gorgeous river view from my fancy lifty desk and aeron ass-cradle, I haven’t driven a car in about 2 years - and I learned on a 71 beetle in the '80s, so driving is my jam - because everything is walkable, and “going on a walk” is absolutely acceptable in my day job. We do Teams a lot. We do Cameras VERY rarely, and usually by accident.
Oh. Surveillance. They gave me a laptop to use. I bought the KVM switch. Don’t use it for dumb stuff. Also I put Google Locate on my phone and shared to my peers. That’s it.
Find a good remote-first place to WFH at. Then move to a great neighbourhood. Have a great life.
Edit: missed the * reference. In the UK, open-plan offices are now considered sexist because they consistently disadvantage a protected half of the population. Be grateful if your office workplace is only “60% sexist” and, for fun, see if you can get HR to promote that detail on job descriptions. ;-)
Short answer: https://rtalbert.org/gtd/
(I’m not that guy. That’s just my favorite resource on the topic.)
Long answer: Organizational system for tasks at work and in daily life. People think it sounds boring and makes your life too rigid, but I find it’s exactly the opposite. Once I know what I need to get done and have it out of my head, it frees me up to (1) be deliberate about how I spend my time and (2) focus relatively distraction-free on whatever I’m doing at a given time, even if that’s something simple like watching a movie without wondering whether there’s something I forgot to do for work.
Everybody who is obsessed with an organizational system has their own version that worked for them – for me, it was the one I linked above. The author’s goal really resonated with me: be okay not doing what you’re not doing. It’s not always about doing more. It’s about deciding what you need to do, doing that, and then not having to stress all the time. The article is tailored to academics, which was where I worked at the time, but I still use it now that I’ve moved on, and I see no reason it is not generally applicable.
It seems like a lot at first, but you don’t do it all at once. Even the author of the article recommends that you start small. I spent years doing just the first few steps without even attempting bigger-picture planning and review stuff, and it was still life-changing for me.
If any of this resonates with you, I’d recommend you give the first step a shot today. Keep it simple, start small, but actually start.
A nice small (and cute!) backpack that I always take with me when I go outside, plus a water bottle that I have near me at all times.
Getting a job that paid more money than I actually need to survive.
Leaving America.
Hoping to do the same in the next couple of years. My current employer seems to be open to allowing me to relocate to the EU (I already work on an international team), but I need to work through the logistics. I also don’t want to be just another expat driving up housing costs and barely speaking the local language
I planned to do the same since 2021 if the election went to shit. Only because I landed in a relationship with someone who can’t relocate am I still in this shithole.
Book called “Discover What You Are Best At” by Linda Gail. It’s a bunch of self-tests that take about half a day to finish with a list of jobs that use those skills. When you can wake up on a rainy Monday and not feel awful, you’ve solved most of your problems.
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Think of it this way. A nurse, a hair stylist, and a product demonstrator all need good people skills and good dexterity. Three totally different jobs with the same skill set.
The book gives you dozens of options
Buying a menstrual cup. It feels so natural, I forget it’s there, and it holds an entire day’s worth of blood and then some.
How do I unread something?
Weird comment
They’re not drinking out of it, relax.
I mean a vampire might?
I do know people who use the blood to fertilize their plants, though.
“Feed me, Seymour!”
Grow up
Lighten up
Drugs
Running, also marijuana
Starting or quitting the marijuana?
Starting ofc,no smoking though,dry herb vaporizer (even better if water filtered but not necessary) is my way. Also edibles
Starting and quitting have made my life better at different points, so I was curious. Edibles are super nice since there’s no throat irritation, but I do really enjoy the finer control over how high one gets that smoking gives. Vaping is a pretty good in-between.
Teaching myself how to cook from scratch ingredients.
It allowed me to completely reform my diet, I could eat anything I wanted (on the condition I self-imposed that it had to be made by) and I lost 130 lb as a result.
I’m not saying it wasn’t a lot of work, it was, but it was an investment in myself.
Now I am able, with no pre-planning, to look in a fridge and whip something up delicious in 30 minutes.
An accidental discovery through this diet reformation, was that I discovered I am intolerant to wheat and gluten! Not celiac, not allergic, but it provokes my autoimmune disorder.
I am now psoriasis free after being a terrible sufferer for almost three decades. Also my joint pain went away.
It has saved me a phenomenal amount of money, given me great body awareness. It’s also expanded my food horizons.
- Daily walks and eating healthy food (aka no industrially processed shit). I went from being barely able to walk at all a few years ago (not exagerating) to someone happily walking for miles every single day. Also I’m somewhat much slimmer too :p
- Cutting down screen time, like by a lot. Which helps in getting more time to do fun & exciting stuff (including walks)
Developing and following basic principles of organisation:
- If it’s in use, set it apart.
- If it’s often used, it should be at hand.
- If it’s used with something else, group them together.
- Beyond that, put it in a predictable place. Don’t try to be smart.
For some people this might look obvious, but for me it wasn’t - my mum is noticeably disorganised and my father was a hoarder, so I never had the chance to learn those things through my childhood. But once I got those things right, they improved my quality of life by a lot.
Eating (mostly) clean, retirement, weight lifting / a personal trainer, and limiting my screen time.
A gym membership, reducing social media, and cutting prolly out of my life who don’t deserve to be in it.
