Category: sethwCategory: sethw

On Wednesday I hosted a talk about Breaking Up With Gmail. During the call we agreed that it’s not “all or nothing,” just a little less of the dumb shit. I’ve still got my Gmail account (from 2005), but it’s a place-holder account for occasional client work and such, and I’ve been paying for Fastmail (referral link) since 2014. Progress, not perfection!

On Thursday morning I did a Substack Live with artist Mel Mitchell-Jackson and we talked about internet platform burnout, leaving stable jobs to pursue creative work, big social media numbers that don’t convert to actual sales (500,000!?!?), the importance of building trust, and why it’s so hard to make art when also trying to please the algorithms; watch it here.

Then on Thursdays Escape Pod Zoom call we did a “show and tell,” where everyone got to talk about what they do, and what they’re up to!

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On today’s Substack Live Mel Mitchell-Jackson and I talked about internet platform burnout, leaving stable jobs to pursue creative work, social media’s failure to convert to actual sales, the importance of building trust, and why it’s so hard to make art when also trying to please the algorithms.

Mel on dashboards, and playing the numbers game:

“These stats dashboards just want you to be working harder, faster, all the time and they don’t think about your well being. And that is horrible for a creative person because then you lose your own sacred space to make your work.”

On getting views on platforms, but not much sales:

“I was promoting the program on both YouTube and TikTok. And in the promotion on TikTok, I was posting every day. Sometimes three times a day… I was spending a full time job, like 36 hours a week on TikTok in order to promote this thing. And then when I looked at my like backend website stats, I learned that none of my traffic or sales for this were brought by TikTok. I was just spinning my wheels.”

Oh, and Mel talks about a video they made about one of their paintings, and it got 500,000 views on TikTok, but didn’t lead to one sale.

Two people were bewildered by my recent Break Up With Gmail video call.

“What’s wrong with email?”

“I thought you wanted people to get back to email?!”

I’ve got nothing against email, it’s Gmail I’ve got a problem with.

Google harvests too much data, has too much control over what you see (or don’t see), and if you ever get locked out your account, good luck talking to a human to get that sorted out!

Sign up for Fastmail here to save 10% off your first year (affiliate link).

Sometimes I help people realize that building something is a lot of work. Here are two examples of that, where we arrived a few rounds into our Email Guidance sessions:

“Took some time to sit with it and realized that pursuing [REDACTED] isn’t realistic for me at this time. I really appreciate your insight and the clarity it helped bring me.”

“In the end, I was able to decide that I actually want to scale back and just have [REDACTED] as a “fun thing” for me and that my [main job] needs to be my sole focus for work. I don’t have the energy to do both and so your help also helped me figure that out too!”

It’s not “never,” it’s just not now. Sometimes things need to come into alignment, doors need to open, others need to shut. That can take time, even years. I didn’t set off years ago thinking I’d be helping people with this as I approach turning 50 years of age, but I know 25 years ago all of this would have been “not now.”

About a week after hosting Break Up 💔 With Social Media Day, and deleting the YouTube and Substack apps from my phone, I reinstalled YouTube.

It was a moment of weakness, and there I was, flipping through YouTube shorts, consuming the digital cotton candy. Twenty minutes later I deleted it again. “Progress, not perfection,” as the AA saying goes.

Lately my phone is sits plugged in while I take walks or make coffee. I read a book while eating lunch instead of watching videos. I use the phone app to talk to people, but use my computer to reply to messages, or watch a movie, or write a post like this one you’re reading.

I haven’t written many (any?!) posts about my personal screen time or phone habits, but I figured this might be a good time since I don’t want to come off like I’m perfect, or beyond temptation. I’m also inspired by Manuel Moreale’s posts about reducing screen time.

We’re all just trying to figure this out, and I fully believe it’s better when we do that together.