This week, I took some time to work on my digital hygiene, and I wanted to share what I did.
This article is meant to be a companion piece to Andrej Karpathy’s post on digital hygiene. Andrej’s post is the starting point of digital hygiene and focuses on how to maintain proper privacy and security online. Before starting the steps in this post, make sure to take care of everything detailed in his.
Part 2 focuses on a third pillar of having a good time online: controlling your attention. The internet is a tool meant to help us, but can easily be abused to do the opposite. We live in an attention economy, and the entire purpose of many online businesses is to steal your focus away from what you’re doing toward something that will turn a profit for them.
This post will detail the basics of maintaining your attention so you can have a safe, enjoyable, and productive time online.
Curate your emails
The first thing you need to do is curate your emails. Most people I know have inboxes with a ridiculous number of unread emails. I’m talking in the ten or twenty thousand range. There’s no way an inbox with this many unread emails is organized.
Your email feed is your first line of contact online. This is where digital information goes to make it to you and is a requirement for living in today’s society. It’s also an incredibly productive way for businesses and scammers to steal your attention.
Almost every time you buy a product online or create an account, the company behind the process will include a little check box to ‘receive promotional emails’. Often, this is defaulted to ‘on’ for you and you have to check it off in order NOT to receive emails you don’t want.
This little trick is a very easy way for companies to have direct access to insert information into your private communications. Companies can insert their information (what are essentially ads) right in with your vital communications required for your everyday business. Better yet for the companies, there isn’t a way for you to get rid of their communications without viewing it somehow. So even if you don’t open the email, you’re still seeing an ad on the subject line.
So let’s fix it.
Your first line of defense against these emails is your email provider’s spam filtering. Most email providers will try to filter spam by default. The problem with this approach is most promotional emails are considered “wanted by the user” because there are some occasions where a user will check the box on purpose because they actually want the emails.
So while the spam filter is good at filtering out spam, it isn’t great at filtering out garbage promotions. This is something that needs to be done manually.
For each promotional email that hits your inbox, you need to unsubscribe from that email list. If you’ve been ignoring promotional emails for too long, this process will take some time upfront, but will be much easier if you start to remove promotional emails as they come in.
Most email clients make this easy by providing an ‘unsubscribe’ button at the top of emails that are sent out via an email list. This button is your best friend. Simply go through your inbox and for any promotions, press it. There are some emails where you’ll have to go to the bottom of the email, find the unsubscribe button, and visit the company’s website to unsubscribe there.
Companies say it can take up to a few weeks for the unsubscription to take effect. Personally, I don’t know if I believe this or if this is planned incompetence to try and keep you on their email list (I’m thinking the latter). For companies that continue sending you emails after you unsubscribe, block them.
Let’s take a look at what doesn’t work.
A lot of people don’t bother going through this process because they use a ‘categorized inbox’ layout that separates their promotions and social emails from their personal emails. I recommend against using this feature and suggest using the ‘unified inbox’ layout to get all your emails in a single in box.
First, the categorized inbox isn’t 100% accurate. This means using this feature will never have the same level of success as manually curating what lands in your inbox.
Second, and more importantly, categorized inboxes aren’t designed to help the consumer. They’re designed to normalize the inbox clutter and promotional emails to allow the email provider to sneakily send their own ads and promotions so they too can profit from your inbox.
My suggestions to protect your attention via your email:
Don’t subscribe to promotional emails.
Unsubscribe from anything that does hit your inbox.
Choose the unified layout for your email client.
Pro tip: If you’re worried about your email having been shared with promotional lists (i.e. you never checked a box, but now you’re getting emails from a company you don’t recognize), tag your email.
For example, when you submit your email add ‘+business’ to the end of it. This means your email according to that business will be ‘youremail+business@email.com’. All emails will still go to your ‘youremail@email.com’ inbox, but they’ll show as sent to the email with the tag. This is an easy way to know exactly how a sender got your email.
Manage your mobile notifications
Your mobile device and the notifications it sends you are also important for online communication. Similar to email, it’s nearly impossible to operate in today’s society without a mobile device capable of sending you notifications.
Also similar to email, companies know that you’ll be checking your mobile notifications and have devised systems to sneak their information in there. They know you have to see their notification even if it’s just to dismiss it. Thus, many app notifications these days are just ads.
Let’s take care of curating this feed too.
First, delete any app you don’t absolutely need. Apps enable a company to send you notifications but that isn’t possible if their app isn’t on your device. Consider deleting apps you do use and using your browser to access their mobile website instead.
Companies push so hard for users to download their app instead of using the mobile website because it gives the company greater control of how they can present information to you. We don’t want that, so remove any apps you don’t need.
Second, take the time to turn off unnecessary ads for the apps you do want. This is similar to unsubscribing to your email feed. If you’ve ignored this for a long time, this will take a lot of work upfront but it takes almost no time if continually maintained.
This setting can be managed directly within the notifications pane for both iOS and Android. This makes it easy to curate notifications as they come in by changing their settings when you receive them instead of ignoring them.
My rule of thumb for notifications is to only allow notifications to alert me if they’re time sensitive. Messages from close family members, phone calls, calendar events, alarms, reminders, and the like all fall into this category.
I have a second category of notifications for things I definitely want to know about, but don’t need that information immediately. These notifications still hit my notification center, but they don’t alert. News apps, email apps, and chat apps might fit in this category.
A third class of notification curation I’ve been utilizing recently is having companies send info to my email instead of my notification center. This is entirely dependent on whether the company has it as an option. If it exists, this option will be in your account settings where your notification settings are.
This has been great for splitting out notifications from the second category that I don’t want cluttering my notification center. It actually makes the notification center useful instead of a cluttered mess. Being notified of when you get a new subscriber or follower is a great example of when this class of notification is effective.
I particularly love this third category because any notification you send through it that turns out not to be valuable will automatically be taken care of by decluttering your email in the manner described above.
Remember how important your attention is. How you spend your time determines the person you become and the things you accomplish. Companies want to use that time and attention for their own profit.
If there’s another aspect of digital hygiene that others should know about, make a post and tag me. This knowledge only gets more vital as time goes on and technology advances.
