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Tech, Strategy, and other interesting things by Roberto Zoiaby Roberto Zoia

minimalism

Social Networks’s behavioral addiction

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Cal Newport, in his book Digital Minimalisn, explains that there are two forces that encourage behavioural addiction when using social networks.

The first force, intermittent positive reinforcement, exploits the fact that rewards delivered unpredictably are more enticing than those delivered with a known pattern. The expectation of likes/hearts/retweets after posting online is comparable to gambling.

The second force is the the drive for social approval. Social media is tuned to offer us a rich stream of information about how much (or how little) our friends are thinking about us at the moment.

We didn’t sign up for the digital lives we now lead. They were instead, to a large extent, crafted in boardrooms to serve the interests of a select group of technology investors.

— Cal Newport, Digital Minimalism

A quick test to see how deep these two forces have taken hold of your behavior: delete your Facebook and Instagram apps from your phone for just one day, and see if you show signs of abstinence syndrome. You can always reinstall the apps later if you want.

Productivity: less is more

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After using Todoist for managing my task list for more than a year, I’ve decided to change systems again1.

There’s nothing wrong with Todoist. It can organize tasks into projects, and tag them with contexts. It handles deadlines, integrates well with several mail clients and other programs. Syncronization between the desktop and mobile version works flawlessly.

However, Todoist interface somehow gets in the way between me and my task list.

todotxt-apps_lrg

I’ve switched back to Gina Trapani’s todo.txt, which is just a command line interface to a plain text file. Syncing can be done through Dropbox, and there are several apps available for iOS and Android. I’ve used todo.txt before, so its text interface feels natural to me2.

The first thing I’ve noticed is that now I’m relying a lot more on my task list to organize my day.

  1. I’ve used several task managers before Todoist: the powerful, full-GTD capable Omnifocus, Wunderlist, Todo, an Excel file… ↩
  2. If you don’t feel comfortable with the command line interface, there is an extension for Chrome that provides an UI. ↩