In 2021 I see fewer ads than ever. I also see fewer assaults on my attention than at any point since the mid-2000s.

How can that be true? Ad platforms have never been so dominant, nor their technology so sophisticated. Be it push notifications, ‘watch this next’ prompts, or the irresistable urge to check your feed, a daily swamping of electronic messaging is the common ordeal of life today. How can it be that I’m seeing less?

I think it’ll make the most sense if I walk through a typical weekend day.

I wake up in the morning to take out my dog Evey. While I’m waiting for her to do her thing I open up my iPhone to skim headlines. I fire up the DuckDuckGo browser and click on a bookmark which brings me to an instance of miniflux rss reader that’s running in a docker container on my Synology DS218+. I’ve named the DS218 “rosie”.

Miniflux doesn’t subscribe to most feeds directly. Instead I have a dockerized instance of huginn that subscribes to RSS feeds, filters out entries based on keywords, removes duplicate posts, aggregates based on topic, and generates new RSS feeds. I’ve also configured Huginn to pull tweets from accounts of friends I want to keep up on (ignoring retweets and replies). The result is RSS feeds for “Shopping”, “Health Tech”, “Local”, and “Friends”.

Lastly, Huggin buffers these feeds and publishes them all at once at 5am. Its these “huginnized” feeds that miniflux consumes, allowing me to see all my news feeds at once in the morning. Since nothing new comes throughout the day, I’m not tempted to keep checking. That’s really valuable to me.

I have few messaging apps on my phone, and have configured the notifications to say “you have a new message” rather than tempt me with details. I’m slow to respond to social messages, cultivating an expectation that I can’t be got to at a moments notice.

My entire home network is protected by PiHole running on a Raspberry Pi. This blocks both trackers and ads and so protects both my privacy and attention.

My TV is a dumb Sceptre TV, powered by an NVidia Shield running AndroidTV. I’ve set that up with a custom launcher so that the only things I see are icons for Netflix and Jellyfin. Jellyfin is running on Rosie and means that on the rare occasions I sit down to watch TV I’m not bombarded with suggestions designed to drive my ’engagement’. I watch what I want and then I’m done.

Once I got used to living like this I became more sensitive to interruptions. That’s unpleasant but that harm is dwarfed by the gains I feel in focus. I’m never going back.