Reducing my digital footprint
Following the alignments I’ve set for myself this year on my new year’s resolution, and pursuing the objective of reducing my digital footprint and augmenting my productivity, I resolved that selling what used to be my workstation, and getting rid of digital distraction was the way to go.
Narrowing Social Media Presence
Let’s first discuss the latter of the two since it was the hardest. The approach I took to reducing digital distraction was to close most of my social media accounts, and removing the applications from my cellphone. Psychological stress aside, doing it was actually much simpler that I thought it would be. I did not possess that many accounts (just one on LinkedIn, one on Instagram, and one on facebook), but it seemed at first that if I dared to delete them, I would suddenly cease to exist. After all, everyone I know seems to enjoy what those sites offer, and love updating their status, publishing pictures, and such. It feels unnatural not to be on there with them, doesn’t it?
Looking back after some weeks, I’m truly terrified. How can a social media site be so tightly tied to everyone’s life? Why does it take that much will power to press delete? What’s wrong with us?
Being a Responsible Computing Devices Owner
Regarding the other decision I took, since I owned a laptop, a cellphone, a desktop computer, and a server, choosing what device should I get rid off was not an easy choice since each one of them served a different purpose.
Let’s start with the server. This server I have is an old custom built computer that’s about 11 or 12 years old and has almost no market value, so selling is not an option. I’ve taken good care of it over the years, I’ve replaced some faulty RAM, bought it a new PSU, etc. so throwing it away, and having it become electronic waste doesn’t call my attention since I still have use cases for it, and I love the fact that I’m still able to keep it up and running as an usable device with my copy of OpenBSD.
My laptop and my phone are part of my daily computing, and by selling them I don’t think I can reach any ground breaking productivity boost. If something, it would probably contribute to achieving quite the opposite.
Now, for my workstation/desktop pc, being it a recent acquisition (it’s been about a year since I assembled it), my desktop computer was luckily easy to sell. It had an AMD 5600X processor, 32 GB of DDR4 RAM, an Nvidia 2080 Super graphics card, it had two M.2 drives, one with archlinux with the nvidia open source drivers for my everyday computing needs, and the other one a copy of windows 10 on it for those occasions where my friends and I would spend an afternoon together playing some online games.
The End Result
To be honest, I’m really happy with how it all turned out. The PC I managed to sell it to a friend of mine that was on the search for new hardware, and (as of today), I’m only on Facebook. I was about to remove that account too, but I weighted pros and cons, and decided it was better to keep it since it is my only mean of communication with some relatives.