Reading less short message social media

I stopped scrolling through Bluesky for a month, and I really enjoyed that month.

Even though Bluesky and Mastodon are much nicer places than Twitter, I realized that I don’t enjoy the experience of scrolling through short message social media. There are a few posts here and there that are nice or funny or interesting, but if there’s just a one post that I don’t want to read or think about, the whole experience is ruined for me.

It’s not about keeping your feed clean of extremism and other bullshit. It was easy to keep my feeds clean on Bluesky and Mastodon. But people think and post about a lot of different things, and I’m just not interested in all of them, nor do I want to spend any amount of mental capacity thinking about them. Scrolling past them is difficult. I have to force myself not to read something I’m not interested in. And that just makes it not a great experience.

I subscribe to a YouTube channel because I’m interested in the kind of content they make, and I assume that future content will be similar. And I follow people on Instagram because I like the pictures they post. But short message services just give me too much variety in what to expect.

So, I will continue what I did for a month. I deleted the Bluesky app from my phone and removed it from my browser bookmarks. I’ll still cross-post my posts there, because of course I want to reach an audience. And maybe I’ll post the occasional meme there. (Why not post them here?) But for now, I don’t want to consume text feeds.

Lüften

Who would have thought that opening the windows several times a day would have a lasting effect on reducing the humidity in my home? My parents, probably. And probably everyone else except me.

Don’t get me wrong, I did air the rooms in my apartment regularly! But most of the time, not multiple times a day. For example, I aired my bedroom most days. Maybe I forgot to do it once a week, but I usually do it after I roll out of bed. But in the fall season, the humidity has always been at the upper limit before it’s too high.

I guess I was a bit ignorant because after opening the window for about 15 minutes, the humidity quickly returned to where it was before. I thought this would happen every time, no matter how many times I opened the window. But somehow I forgot the most logical conclusion: that doing it multiple times a day will incrementally dry out the room more and more.

After only 2 weeks of airing all the rooms several times a day, it’s now at a perfectly average level. And my windows are not fogging up as much overnight. I even bought a dehumidifier last year, which helped a bit, but in retrospect wasn’t necessary. I should’ve just opened the damn windows more than once a day.

To be honest, it’s a bit embarrassing to admit my ignorance. But I have learned something!

Don’t stress about falling asleep

What’s the deal with Trash Bags?

I don’t know if it’s just me, but trash bags lately suck. Something very strange must be happening in the trash bag industry. So strange that I find myself constantly thinking about trash bags to the point where buying them gives me anxiety.

Not waking up at 6:30am

Early this morning I woke up briefly, it was 6:30am—yes, that’s early morning for me—and heard very faint shower noises. I usually don’t hear anything from my neighbors, but probably because it was so quiet otherwise, I realized that one of my neighbors had to get up now.

And then I remembered that I used to have to get up at about that time when I went to school. To be exact, I always got up at precisely 6:55am. My morning was always timed to the minute to get the most sleep out of it. The whole family had to coordinate who was in the bathroom at what time. I actually went to bed for another 15 minutes after taking a shower, just to make the most out of every minute of sleep.

Open Ear Earbuds

In-ear earbuds are weird, aren’t they? You’ve got those small rubbery mushrooms that you shove into your ear canal to listen to music and you hope there’s no juicy ear gunk on them when you pull ‘em out.

Picking those low-hanging fruit in your life

When I moved into my first apartment over 11 years ago, I learned something that I continue to learn on a regular basis: solve the little problems in your life. Realize that they’re just low-hanging fruit, ready to be picked.

Low-hanging fruit is a term I usually think of only in the context of work. And I still do! Thinking and writing about low-hanging fruit in the context of my personal life feels strange to me, but of course they exist.

I never really liked the faucet in the kitchen of my new apartment. It was a little loose, and when you rotated it, the whole apparatus rotated a few degrees. It was tall, and the water always splashed more than usual when it fell into the sink, splattering water all over the dark granite countertop and stove. You couldn’t pull the faucet down, and it didn’t have a sprayer. It was inconvenient and annoying.

But I didn’t do anything about it because… I don’t know why? Because it’s just a faucet? It didn’t occur to me that this was a low-hanging fruit that I could solve. I just lived with the damn thing for 2 years. Until I realized that a new faucet only costs 50€ and is easy to replace. I could fix this annoyance in my life with the least amount of effort.

Even the little wiggle it had could have been fixed in a few minutes without any tools. Yet I never did.

And I began to avoid using it because it annoyed me so much. Instead of washing my hands in the kitchen, I didn’t wash them at all I actually went from the kitchen to the bathroom sometimes and washed my hands there so I wouldn’t have to wipe the counter because the water would splash everywhere.

I wasted 2 years on something I could have fixed with the click of a button on amazon and 30 minutes of “work”.

That’s just one of many. I’ve started to identify and fix more of them in my life, but it always takes some time to realize “yeah, this has been bothering me for a while, and it’s easy to fix”.

So here’s my call to you: identify those low-hanging fruits and pick them. The big things in life are hard enough, and the little things make a difference.

One year with the Aeron Chair

1 year ago I wrote about my first two weeks with my new Herman Miller Aeron Remastered chair. So, how is it after a full year?

This chair was the best investment I made last year. My butt never gets tired of this chair.

I still use the tilt mechanism as I configured it a year ago. It’s perfect. I lean back a little, a little more, or not at all. In meetings, I like to lean back a lot, put my hands behind my head and just relax.

It’s a good thing I didn’t get the headrest, because you really don’t need it. When I sit upright, I don’t rest my head. And when I lean back, like I said, I like to put my hands behind my head and lean on them, and it’s really comfortable. It would probably be annoying if there was a headrest.

My back pain never came back! I remember I used to have this constant tension under my right shoulder and looking back it was really not good. But since then it’s just gone. Never had any problems again.

If your job involves sitting at a desk a lot, and sometimes your butt starts to get tired, or you have some tension in your back or shoulders, and you’re not short on money, I would highly recommend buying this chair if you’re not short on money. The price tag may seem high for a chair, but when you consider how expensive a good mattress and pillow is, and how many hours you’ll spend on it, it’s worth every penny. #notsponsored

I’m exceptionally bad at taking breaks

One of my goals for this year is to get better at taking breaks from work. But, honestly, I’m doing a terrible job at it. Whether it’s taking a lunch break, calling it a day, or taking a little coffee break: I don’t stop when I should stop. I keep telling myself I’ll do better, but in the moment, I screw up. And it’s not because work is stressful or too much is expected of me – it’s my own fault.

The problem is, I’m always telling myself that I’ll just finish this one small thing that’ll only take 2 minutes. But then 5 minutes pass, and another 5 minutes, and another, until half an hour has gone by. And suddenly, I’ve only got a short lunch break before the next meeting starts. It’s funny how in this situation I keep looking at the time, seeing how it flies, and I’m just like, “Oh God, I should get going…” but I don’t do it. Even though I should just get up and go. I’m such a dingus.

I know that I don’t have to respond to messages right away. No one expects an immediate response. But it’s just one message, which then turns into a few messages, and then a longer conversation. Or when doing code reviews, I tell myself that I’ll just write those few last comments and finish up the whole review (even though nobody would be mad if I submit only half a review, and do the next half later). Or when I’m coding, just a few more lines of code.

It’s always small tasks that, for some reason, I think will be done in 2 minutes.

But I always feel like I have to get it all done, or else it’s going to occupy my mind all through lunch or the next day. But will it really? Like… really?

Two weeks ago, I took a day off and didn’t check Slack even once. I woke up to a bunch of notifications on my phone, and without reading them, I paused all work-related apps. And you know what? I didn’t check them all day. This surprised me because I usually open Slack automatically, like how you open TikTok, but not while you’re sitting on the toilet. That was a win!

The thing is, I keep telling myself I’ll do better tomorrow, but then I relapse the day after. It feels like an endless cycle. It makes me less motivated to do better. Even though I know I should just take a goddamn break.

Two weeks with the Aeron Chair

I bought a fully loaded Herman Miller Aeron Remastered Chair, and have been sitting on it for the last two weeks. Fun Fact: Aeron stands for “an expensive Ron”. So you’re asking what it’s like to sit on Ron?

How I organize myself (without Productivity Tools)

I’ve always found Productivity Apps ✨ cool ✨. Nice-looking Apps for Todos and Notes, as a single source of truth for everything going on in my life. But I learned that I don’t work like that. Those Apps always felt wrong. I’m very organized without them. For some reason, I’m still envious of people when they show how they use some App to organize their life, but I don’t try them out anymore.

I mainly use Emails, my Desktop, Calendar, and Post-It’s. I know it sounds ridiculously oldschool, but it works pretty well for me. Let me explain:

Small changes are the most stressful

Last week I got a new sofa, and it’s one of the most stressful changes I had in the past.

Big changes are not an issue for me. 10 years ago, when I moved into my very first apartment and lived alone for the first time: no worries at all. It was exciting!

But I struggled so hard with buying a new sofa. It took me a year to get myself to buy a new one. It’s big and comfortable, looks nice, it’s exactly what I wanted. But all the consequences of that change:

• I had to move all the furniture in my office, so my old sofa fits in there. Getting rid of my old sofa wasn’t an option. But now I’m sitting in a different direction on my desk. It just feels wrong. The room looks nice and cozy, but it’s so different. My mic boom arm now doesn’t fold away easily because it bangs against the wall. Do I also need to move that thing? So many changes!
• I always folded my laundry on top of the backrest of my old sofa. It was nice. I could watch TV while folding up my tees. But I cannot do that anymore with my new sofa.

Changing everything? Not an issue.

Changing a small minor detail? Oof.