When we give ourselves fewer places to dig, we go deeper, and what we uncover is more rare and valuable than the usual stuff near the surface.

— David Cain, from Raptitude

As of right now my collections, have probably more items than what I can go through in a single lifetime, and keep growing in size much faster than I go through them. I believe that algorithm-driven feeds no longer have a purpose for me: I already have as much novelty as I could want (and even more).

This is why I’ve decided to follow David’s Depth Year tradition: “no new hobbies, equipment, games, or books are allowed during this year. Instead, you have to find the value in what you already own or what you’ve already started.”

Granted it won’t be as deep as David probably envisioned, but it’d be a lot deeper than the status quo. As such, I’m hoping it’ll serve as a first step to deeper, more meaningful iterations over the years.

I’ve come up with a simple method for now (to be improved as I go through the project)

No social media feeds

These were the ones constantly adding new things to my lists, so I decided to avoid them from now on. This includes:

  1. Hiding youtube home feed, subscription tab and related videos column using DF YouTube
  2. Hiding Home and Local Timeline feeds from Mastodon
  3. Not browsing thorugh reddit’s r/all nor HackerNews anymore
  4. Deleting my blogroll (I might go back to reading blogs in the future, but right now I have enough articles to read, I don’t see the need in having more)

I’ll still login to those services (except reddit and HN which I quit a while back) to read mentions and messages, and I’ll still be reachable through mail.

Working on 1 project per category at a time

The categories are:

  1. Academic
  2. Engineering
  3. Music
  4. Painting
  5. Passive (consuming books, posts, movies, series, and games)

Each project will have their own wiki page.

1 month quanta

I’ll work on each project for at least a month before allowing myself to switch to another one. This of course excludes projects that are finished or enter a Waiting For state before their time slice.

I’ve set a /now page, so that anybody interested might take a look from time to time at what I’m working on. Let’s see what comes out of this :)