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Ask TOS: How do you keep up with things without doomscrolling?
418 points by quietcarriage 6 hours ago | 16 comments
I noticed this week that I'd opened the same three apps eleven times before lunch and couldn't tell you one thing I'd read in any of them. I'm not trying to go off-grid. I still want to know when my ferry is running again, when a friend publishes something, and roughly what's happening in the world.

What actually works for you? Specific setups welcome: what you read, where, at what time of day, and what you gave up to get there.

RSS, still, after all these years. About 120 feeds in a reader that shows them oldest first and has no unread count.

The missing unread count matters more than anything else about it. There's no number to get to zero, so I read until the kettle boils and then I stop.

No unread count is underrated. The moment a reader shows me 1,204 I start skimming to make the number go down, which is doomscrolling with extra steps.
Exactly. A number turns reading into inbox triage. Mine just says 'nothing new since 9am' when I'm done, which is the nicest sentence any software has ever said to me.
The problem I keep hitting with RSS is that half the sites I care about don't have a feed any more, or have one that only gives you the first sentence.
Partial feeds are the worst of both worlds: you still have to click through, and now you're on the site with the autoplaying video.

I've started emailing authors to ask for full-text feeds. About a third said yes, which is a far better hit rate than I expected.

Newsletters, with one rule: they go to a separate address that I only open on Saturday morning with coffee. Anything urgent enough to need reading on a Tuesday will reach me some other way.
Same, and the Saturday batch has a nice side effect: you notice which ones you skip every single week. I unsubscribed from six in a month without any agonising.

The ones that survived are mostly small. A cooking one, a local news one, and a money one written by someone younger than my shoes. The local one is the one I'd keep if I could only keep one. National news finds me whether I want it or not. Nobody else is going to tell me the ferry is back on Monday.

I deleted every app with an infinite feed from my phone and kept them on the laptop. Willpower never worked for me; friction does. Nobody doomscrolls sitting upright at a desk with a trackpad.
I promise you people doomscroll sitting upright at a desk with a trackpad. I am one of them. In a sense I'm doing it right now.
A kitchen timer. A physical one, the twisty kind. Fifteen minutes, then I stop wherever I am.

I tried the phone's own screen time limits, but dismissing them became a reflex within a week. You can't tap 'ignore' on a timer that's ringing on the other side of the room.

Mild dissent: I like my feed. It has taught me about tile restoration, Bulgarian folk singing and how container ships are loaded, none of which I would ever have subscribed to on purpose.

Not everything has to be a carefully curated reading list. Some of the best things I've found were things I'd never have gone looking for.

The serendipity argument is real, but I think it's about the ratio. If one scroll in ten turns up the container ship video, great. For me it was more like one in two hundred, and the other hundred and ninety-nine made me feel worse.
That's fair, and I'll admit I've trained mine hard. I hit 'not interested' on anything with an angry face in the thumbnail, and it took weeks. Most people never do that, and I'm not sure they should have to.
I'm sceptical of the whole genre of this question. Every few months there's a thread like this, everyone posts their system, and six months later the same people are back with a new system.

Maybe the honest answer is that it's hard, it stays hard, and the system matters less than noticing when you've slipped.

That's probably true, and it's partly why I asked for specifics. I'm less interested in the perfect system than in what people have kept doing for more than a year.
What I want is one list. Every site I actually read, newest first, and at the bottom it says 'that's everything'. A feed with an end.

I've built three bad versions of it with scripts, and every one broke the first time a site redesigned.