Take back control of your digital life
Social media is designed to keep you hooked, not informed. There's an old-school secret to take back control of what you read.
We all feel it. The news are so fast that we can't keep up and we feel like we are always missing out on something. Our social media feeds are so tweaked to keep us hooked that they might as well be heroin or meth. Your friend just had a baby, and a former colleague is excited about taking on a new challenge on LinkedIn. They're not excited, just relieved to escape the dread of unemployment. And the baby is cute, but you and that friend drifted away a long time ago.
You're not missing out. That social media feed is a river of sludge and AI Slop where we compete for likes and shares that only help some CEO get another Ferrari. Finding something useful is a glitch in the algorithm that disconnected you from your friends and news sites that actually had something good. Now you're drained and you roll your eyes every time you open LinkedIn.
There is a better way
Stop and think what really matters to you. Your friends, your job, your art, whatever it is, think about where they post online. A blog? A website? There is an old-school way of keeping track of new things published on these open channels — RSS Feeds.
You pick the websites and blogs that really matter and your RSS Feed reader will fetch new articles and keep track of what you read and saved.
No ads, no distractions, no algorithms.
I use NetNewsWire, which is free and syncs across my laptop and phone. Feedly is a common cross-platform service that does the same. And a search for "RSS reader" will give you apps for all tastes and preferences.
From the screenshot you can see that my setup is simple. News, some websites about Multiple Sclerosis, and a lot of interesting people that I found across the web.
For people in Public Relations, an app like this can be very useful for daily Press Clippings. Open the app, skim the headlines, pick what's relevant and share it with the team.
If you subscribe to a lot of substacks, you can move those to your RSS Reader App to keep that mess away from your inbox. (For now, at least. Substack may remove RSS support
Saving things outside your brain
For me, RSS feeds are a productivity secret. That uncategorized folder has a mess of websites and sometimes I see an article that deserves saving to use in a blog post or some other research. Most times, I would save the clipping to Obsidian by hand.
This week I improved that process. Using Claude Code, I now have a tiny script on my computer that regularly fetches the starred articles to save as Clipping Notes in Obsidian. It's available on GitHub.
brunoamaral
The important thing to remember is that you don't need to remember everything about what's out there. You actually need a way to get things outside of your head. Memorise that recipe your mother taught you; that's valuable. The rest, you can save as notes somewhere.
I keep a lot of notes about a lot of things just in case they become useful in the future.
And lately, I have been telling Claude Cowork to use these notes for added context on tasks, and it has improved the quality of the output.
Making sense of the mess
If you subscribed to a few newspaper feeds, you'll soon see some duplicate content. Rui Carmo decided to put his skill into organising topical rss feeds for business and technology.
He built an RSS Feed summariser that everyone can use. It generates news bulletins with links to the original sources.
And this is just the beginning of what we can do with these content feeds.
Surfing the social feeds
Social Media sites don't usually offer RSS Feeds, because it is unfriendly to their bottom line and KPIs.
Lately I have seen some talk about Surf, a new site by Flipboard that tries to organise all the sites we want to track. I don't have an opinion yet, but it looks nice.
It is a good idea but instead of trying a new tool it may be time to trim the list of people you follow on social media to those that really matter.
I leave with a question: what do sites like X and Facebook do to contribute to your happiness?
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