Introduction

Thinking on these year long projects I occasionally undertake, it struck me how far I am outside the ‘influencer’ mindset. I’ve posted before about the channel Click for Taz and I how I find it almost unimaginably likeable. Taz regularly does challenges that make for ‘good content’ but they are things like ‘Live on a £1 a day for a week’, or ‘I spent 24 hours not talking to anyone’. They’re small, potentially viral bits of content. They’re not these intimidating deep-dives into unfamiliar territory.

I guess it’s the difference between doing something ‘for fun’ and doing something for personal growth. One month, I’m already feeling the difference kick in. So let’s talk about the two big growth projects of the year.

Project Unplug 2022

So, it turns out that unless you’re willing to pay for Franz it will go out of its way to make your experience of using it unpleasant. Such as adding artificial delays before it lets you see any of your messages. ‘Upgrade to a paid plan to remove this completely artificial 30s delay’.

Given how I only wanted it to consolidate some messenger apps I decided in the end to get rid of it. I had been considering upgrading to a paid account for Franz, but I refuse to do that when the incentives are ‘a removal of pointless and engineered aggravations’. The free version of Franz supports only three services. I was needing to integrate four, which is why I was mulling it over. Not now though. It’s no longer part of my recommended toolkit. In fact, if anything, it’s now an anti-recommendation. I’ll let you know if any alternatives strike my fancy.

The year has started off well other than that. The 1st of January 2022 fell on a Saturday which means I hit the ground running. From the moment the clock hit 00:00 my internet blocker slammed into effect, with a 56 hour window during which the vast majority of the Internet would be unavailable. And I found that I didn’t really miss it much. Don’t get me wrong – I kept opening up sites only to be told ‘You’ve quit these’ but that was mostly muscle memory. I can’t say I leapt into a new philosophy of intense productivity – I was also recovering from what might have been Covid. Mostly I just watched Kurzgesagt videos I had downloaded in 2021. Still though, I expected the start of the process to be bad. I expected to get Digital Withdrawal Symptoms. Not a bit of it though.

And really, that’s been the pattern of it. Although I have to confess I didn’t bring down the Internet cage on the third weekend, but for a good reason – I was busy migrating all of my various websites and web-based projects from one host to another. Ideally that would have been as simple as add the two hosts to the whitelist. It’s never that easy though because services sprawl. They authenticate through third party servers, or require external websites to provide portions of service. And migration is never a simple process so it also involves some checking the Internet to find out ‘why does this perfectly straightforward thing refuse to work?’

There are quite a lot of sites and tools I use, so it was a weekend project. Not 100%, but in the end switching the block on and off became just too annoying and I thought ‘This is the only time I’ll need to do this’. I did still keep my Internet usage down to the bare minimum.

Now though I’m all migrated to new hosting at Hetzner, who have been providing me with a couple of reasonably priced VPS servers for a while. I was previously with Siteground but they are just ridiculously expensive – and pretty uncompetitive in how parsimonious their offering is. With Hetzner I get a pretty comprehensive and generous package for about 10 euros a month. Siteground have a reasonable starter offer of £7.49 for new accounts, and I would have happily extended at that. However, their bill for me was an eye-watering £30 a month, or £360 for the year. Oh, and that’s excluding VAT so the actual price is £36 a month (£432 for the year). And for that I get about half of what Hetzner offers. They had moved to a new, weird management system for sites too and I found it deeply frustrating. So away we go, because that’s an astonishing price to ask for a service that is, at its best, ‘fine’.

I still recommend Siteground for people starting a website, at least on the introductory rate. But while Hetzner doesn’t offer the same comprehensive ‘one click’ ecosystem… it’s a much cleaner environment with much more control, at a much more reasonable price. And I won’t need to keep such a close eye on my quotas, since instead of a miserly 40 GB of storage (on the highest plan) I have a relatively luxurious 100 GB. We’ll see how it goes though, but to be honest I am so tired of migrating websites. As long as they don’t screw up I’ll probably just stick with them.

So yeah, that’s been a bit of a bump in the Project Unplug 2022 roadmap but I think it’s reasonable under the circumstances and not something I’ll have cause to repeat once it’s all done and out of the way. Once everything is in place, whitelists should cover 95% of my use-cases.

I think I will hand off the password for switching off the block to someone else in February. What Migration Weekend has shown is that leaving that up to my own willpower works, but it’s also too easy to do. As Pratchett argues in Thud! – if you break a promise for a good reason then you’ll eventually break a promise for a bad reason.

That said, the stats are in for January and they are, I think, reasonably good!

I reset my time tracker on the 9th, because I forgot to do it on the first. I’m writing this in the evening of the 30th. This is what it tells me I have been doing in that period of time:

Now, I found out a couple of things here. One is that it counts time that is blocked as time spent on a site. If I go to Facebook and Cold Turkey says ‘Nope, sorry man’ – this plugin still tracks it as ‘time spent on Facebook’. So this is a bit of an over-estimate.

I installed this plugin on the 9th of July in 2021. At the start of the new year, I had spent 1212 hours on the Internet over 175 days. It is a fraction short of seven hours, every day, on the Internet. And as the last post on the topic showed – it’s not like I was doing anything useful with it.

Now though, my average is a sliver over two hours, and most of the time has been spent on work activities. That makes sense, because I can now only access the Internet during work hours. So I have cut my internet time down dramatically – I have cut my online activities down to 30% of what they were before.

I think I can still do better. I still want to get Facebook and Youtube consumption down lower. There’s a certain amount of ‘web migration time’ in here that is hard to unpick, but it’s pushed my online time up a bit. I’m not displeased with the progress on Project Unplug 2022 but I want to go harder on it. I still have some bad patterns that I need to break.

Not a bad start to the year though.

As to what I actually miss… not much. I still have my friends on various chat channels. I do find though that I occasionally feel a touch of FOMO when I think ‘I wonder if anyone has been in touch directly on FB’. I’ll get over that.

Let’s see how February works out.

Depth Year 2022

The Depth Year portion of 2022 is the part I’m most confident about holding to, given that I’ve already successfully completed one. The coupling of Project Unplug to this goal actually seems like it’ll make it easier rather than harder – I won’t even be exposed, in the main, to temptations. When I did the project in 2019 I was still on Twitter and still seeing the constant churn of hype culture. New games I should play. New TV shows I should watch. All of the temporary distractions of a culture’s over-amped novelties. None of that is coming my way, which means that almost all temptations will spring from internal sources.

When I did this last time, one of the things I found most useful in terms of analysis and commentary was the ‘List of Things I Wanted’. Many things appeared on that list, and every month I’d take things off and put new things on. At the end I looked at the ‘half-life of interest’ and found that ‘wanting’ things is almost always only temporary.

So, I’m going to do that again this year.

Currently, my ‘things I want’ list has the following entries:

• Red Seas under Red Skies, which is the second in the Gentleman Bastard series.
• The Republic of Thieves, which is the third in the Gentleman Bastard series.
• Manifold Gardens, which is one of the chamber-based puzzle games I like so much, but apparently it is one of the best.
• Don’t Look Up, which is a movie recommended by a friend.

Lies of Locke Lamora, which is the first of the Gentleman Bastard books, is in itself a great example of why I am repeating the Depth Year process. I’ve had this book for years, and never read it. And yet as soon as I did I found myself besotted with the storytelling, with the world, and with the characters. If I already own things this good, it is ridiculous to think I need new things at all.

Manifold Gardens… I don’t know though. This is a loose desire. I’ve seen people rave equally hard about The Sojourn and QUBE 2 and honestly neither of those really grabbed me much. But reading the blurb about it on Steam does make it sound very interesting. I doubt I’ll care much about this one by the end of the year, but the job here is to document the Depth Year not try to predict its course.

As to Don’t Look Up – I suspect it’ll stay on the list for a while because it was recommended by a friend with judgement I trust. What’ll almost certainly happen though is I’ll forget why it was recommended and it’ll just gently slide off without much fanfare.

One thing I did notice though was that this month I wanted to play a new game called Not For Broadcast. It had hit release after being in early access for a while. I went to add it to the list here, and then I found out I already owned it! It had come my way via a Humble Choice option months ago. Likewise I’d idly been eyeing an Epic Game Store freebie that I would have liked to have played but couldn’t because it got added in 2022. But while I was tidying up my Steam library I found – yep, I owned that one too.

It just goes to show… something. Whatever it shows, I don’t think It’s good.

Thanks for reading everyone! I will check in with you next month in the normal fashion!