Part of breaking up with Google becomes abstract. Sure, you can say you’re not going to use Google Search anymore, but what about SEO?! How will people find your site if you don’t optimize your website for the random search traffic that the biggest search engine might send your way?

I’m not trying to get everyone on my Escape Pod Zoom calls. I’m trying to keep the people who keep showing up – those are my people! So I try to recognize where conversations are going, or themes that keep coming up. Those become future blog posts, or sometimes future Escape Pod Zoom calls.

Think less about reaching everyone, and think about reaching one specific person. Literally.

For your next post, don’t write for everyone. Instead, write to one specific person who might need it, and then send it to them directly a few days later.

On a recent Escape Pod call, we got talking about resisting the all of nothing approach to doing a thing.

Specifically, if you’re burning out at work, you don’t need to rage quit. Instead, rest for five minutes. That small dose of rest won’t fix everything, but as my guest brought up, if you do it for five minutes, you’ll want more.

Once we start down the road of “hey, this feels nice,” we start to make time for the thing that feels nice.

When I’m frustrated with something on the computer, I go for a five minute walk. And that five minutes usually turns into ten, which is ten good minutes away from the screen. Those ten minutes won’t get me to a 10 mile run, but they’re 10 minutes that’ll get me there eventually.

Think about how you could spend five (or 10) minutes on the thing you’d rather be doing. Again, it might not be the final version of the big thing you’d rather be doing, but what are the smaller bits and pieces you could do instead? What actions, even for just five minutes, help build the foundation of the thing you want?

​Host of the Off The Grid Podcast, author of Your Attention is Sacred Except on Social Media, and founder of Softer Sounds Studio, Amelia Hruby returns as a special guest!

​We’ll talk about writing books, working without social media, leaving Substack for Ghost, and so much more.

​One third interview, then two thirds open Q&A; this is a communal and interactive Escape Pod, so bring your questions and ideas for Amelia!

Thursday, September 10 at 2:00 PM EDT → https://luma.com/365eysla

I’ve written about all the attention we’ve paid to social media platforms over the years.

I ran 1,105 miles in 2020, which took me around 200 hours. Scrolling 33 minutes daily on your phone adds up to about 200 hours a year, too.

Since May 26th, a few days after my 50th birthday, I decided to walk 10 miles a day. After a few too many months of inactiviy, I needed to get moving again. Walking this far takes me over three hours a day, so that’s three less hours of looking at my phone.

I talk about this a lot – the idea of taking the time we spend on social media and spending it on our craft. If we practiced our guitar more, wrote more poems, made more paintings, went for more walks, had more conversations, read more books – where could that lead?

Now, when I walked 10 miles that first day, nothing changed. But the hours add up, the miles add up, the movement adds up, and sometimes not in the most obvious ways. There’s no immediate prize, I just get to do it again the next day.

Walking 10 miles a day for 100 days didn’t lead to a finish line, but it reminds me of the concept of “increasing the surface area of luck.”

From James Clear (author of Atomic Habits):

“The forager who explores widely will find lots of useless terrain, but is also more likely to stumble across a bountiful berry patch than the person who stays home.

Similarly, the person who works hard, pursues opportunity, and tries more things is more likely to stumble across a lucky break than the person who waits.”

Spending three hours a day walking instead of scrolling has now led me to sign up for a “12 Hour Endurance Trail Run.” There’s a five mile trail loop, and I get to do it as many times as I can in 12 hours, with 200+ other people

It’s a new thing to go to, meet some people, have some conversations, and a whole lot of “getting out of my comfort zone” (literally and figuratively, of course). This is “surface area for luck.”

Practicing your guitar for three hours a day doesn’t guarantee you’ll play the Super Bowl Halftime show, or making pottery every day doesn’t promise a full time income, but these things can become conversation starters, or give you something interesting to talk about, maybe lead to a new friend – these things come along as a by-product of just doing a thing.

Walking 10 miles a day is not exactly aligned with the work I do in email marketing, or gathering people to talk about quitting social media, but maybe in a weird way it’s completely aligned.

Because if you want to leave social media, you need to put your time somewhere else, give your attention to something that needs your attention.

I was asked recently on a podcast “what am I running from” by seeking to escape from social media, and at the time I didn’t have a great answer, but I think I’ve come to the idea that to escape requires a destination.

We’re not seeking just how to delete an app or marketing without social media, but asking “where are we going?”

From the Technically Good newsletter, on digital sovereignty.

“Reminder that “The Cloud” is “someone else’s computer,” and if that computer happens to be under the purveyance of someone who isn’t completely rational, that could be a problem. File under: Digital sovereignty. … especially since also, someone can, in fact, just turn off your cloud, leaving you without your data.

That link leads to “Over 170,000 Nonprofits Lost All Their Data. Is Microsoft to Blame?” over at Slate, and it’s tragic:

“The small nonprofits left behind are now visibly struggling. The childhood healthcare nonprofit operator I spoke to lost about 500 gigabytes of his firm’s data … The man who runs the disability services nonprofit wrote to me that it’ll take him and his mother “hundreds of hours” to fully re-create the instructional videos and documents that went poof.”

Leaving all your data to one company is a risk, no matter how big they are (Google Drive, Airtable), or how benevolent (like Proton). Local and off-site back ups are crucial, but unfortunately not everybody knows about these practices, or how to implement them (I’m doing two calls this week on breaking up with Google).

For one, download your email list often. You just never know when a service might shut down, or you get locked out!

Once you’ve got your cloud files on your own computer, back them up somewhere off-site (I use Backblaze, but pCloud and Jottacloud looks pretty good, too).

Off-site means your files are safe if your computer breaks, or your house burns down. Yes, these services are “someone else’s computer” still, which is why we seek the best solutions we can, rather than put our trust in the giant companies who grow too big to care.

Whenever I see people being hopeful about returning to the way things were, there’s always someone saying “we can never go back,” and I think that’s hilarious.

Like, are we really going to jump to yet another social media platform? Did we all jump to Mastodon, or one of the 19 different Instagram replacements? I keep having conversations with people who are done with signing up for new services, creating new accounts.

And sure, is this cognitive bias? YES. My job is talking to people who dislike social media, who want to get away, who seek a different path – heck yes, I am biased.

On the other hand, are you thumbs up with Musk / Zuckerberg / Mosseri? Are you ready to invest your time, effort and energy into the same old same old?

Are we content to keep following 3000 people? Reading 30 new articles every hour? Watching 5 hours of video per day, 13 seconds at a time?

Or are you ready to buy DVDs and CDs and magazines again? Talk to your neighbors? Seek community?

I know which direction I’m heading.

If you ever feel like sending a weekly newsletter to your subscribers is too much, Brick has sent me seven emails in 12 days.

​Maybe you’re curious about leaving Google – Gmail, Workspace, Google Search, Photos, Drive.

​There’s plenty of videos to watch and articles to read on the subject, but it might be helpful to talk to people who’ve actually left some of those Google Products!

​I left Google Workspace years ago and use Fastmail and Proton. Other people on the call have various stories and new tools that they use.

​This isn’t a webinar and there’s no pitch. It’s a group of people who’ve been down this path (or are just starting to think about it) trading real experiences.

Monday, August 31 at 9:00 AM → https://luma.com/wh4686yh

Thursday, September 3 at 2:00 PM EDT → https://luma.com/1q9brs2t