I love social media, email, apps, and all the wonderful things on the internet, but I also love my offline projects, nature, and my family.

Lately I feel I’ve gotten stuck in my phone and it’s time to get out. Time to change the focus and spend more time on other things. On things that really matter.

I’ve started that by unfriending and unfollowing people. I follow way to many people on Twitter and Facebook and it’s time-consuming.

When TweetBot says I have 150 unread tweets, I feel a little discouraged as I feel like I have to read them all. Why?! Why should I have to read them all? I’ve started unfollowing people to cut down on the number of tweets. No offense, but I can’t follow everyone.

I’ve also found TweetBot’s amazing mute feature. You can mute all the retweets from a user, or a keyword, hash tags, sites, and more. Mute all the noise and get on with life. This is very helpful!

On Facebook, I’ve run into a similar situation. I’ve been checking it once a day, or longer, and feeling so far behind. I feel I have to read every post. So I’m unfriending people.

If you added me just because we went to high school together, and you never interact with me on Facebook, then what’s the point? Again, it’s nothing against you, but I need my time back.

Next up are notifications. I’ve disabled Twitter and Facebook notifications on my computer as they are too distracting. They can appear on my phone, but they don’t need to interrupt my work.

Email is an issue too. That’s pretty easy to clean up. Just unsubscribe from all the things. Seriously, I don’t read half the email I get so why get it in the first place? And for email I do get, filter it into folders so only important things hit my inbox and I can deal with it when I want to. I haven’t disabled email notifications yet, but I’m thinking about it.

I’m also killing app notifications much as possible. Notifications can be great, but they can also be horribly distracting. And why do I need so many apps that all do the same thing? Or games that bug me to play every few hours? Uninstall.

Now I know I’m not going to change over night and it’s going to be hard for me. But I feel like I have to do something. I’m not quitting anything, just simplifying.

My goal is to cut down the time on social media, email, or other generally distracting noise, and focus more on real life.