How Replacing Social Media with RSS Feeds Improved My Focus

Social media has been sapping my time, focus and energy for years as I'm sure it has for many of you. I was always kind of aware of it and I've tried to limit it somewhat, but I never really took any drastic measures. That is until recently. I've deleted most of my social media accounts and greatly limited the amount of content I consume, which I now almost exclusively do through RSS feeds. This has helped me tremendously in staying focused and productive. In this article, I'll go over how I made the switch and the benefits I've seen since.

Most people in my generation (zoomer here) and beyond grew up, and are growing up on the internet, social media, and the like. I'm no different. I've been using social media since a young age and never thought much of it. It was just a part of life. A way to socialize and stay connected with friends and family. It started out pretty innocently.

But as time went on, I became more and more addicted to it without realizing, and it became more and more of a problem. I would spend hours on it every day, scrolling through my feeds, watching videos, reading articles, and so on. And I would do this even when I had other things to do. It was a way to procrastinate, to escape from reality, to numb myself. I would catch myself try to rationalize my use of it, saying that it was a way to stay informed, connected, and entertained. But I was fooling myself. I knew I needed to make a change.

I started by deleting most of my social media accounts and apps. A few I kept for professional reasons, but I made sure to address my usage of them. I want to go through the process of how I did this in more detail in a future post, but for now, I'll just say that it was a lot easier than I thought it would be. I thought I really needed some of these accounts and apps, but once they were gone I realized that I didn't miss them at all. In fact, I felt a sense of relief and freedom.

I didn't want to completely cut myself off from the world, though. I still wanted to stay informed, learn new things, and be entertained from time to time. But I wanted to be intentional about it. So I turned to RSS feeds. I had heard about them before, but I never really used them.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It's a way for websites to syndicate their content automatically. It's like subscribing to a magazine or newspaper, but online. You can subscribe to the feeds of your favorite websites and get their latest content delivered to you automatically. This way you don't have to visit each website individually to see if they have new content. You can use an RSS reader to manage your feeds and read the content.

There are many different RSS Readers out there and I am still experimeting with a few them, so I won't make any recommendations here. But it shouldn't be that difficult to find one to start with.

I started by making a list of all the websites, blogs, and YouTube channels that I wanted to keep up with. This was an important step because I wanted to cut out as much noise as possible and only keep the most important sources of content. I wanted to make sure that I was only consuming content that was valuable to me.

I then subscribed to the RSS feeds of these sources in my RSS reader. The nice thing about these readers is that you can easily organize your content into different categories and folders. You could also sync it across devices, but I decided to only use it on my computer to limit my usage even more.

I would suggest to install the Unhook browser extension if you're going to add YouTube channels to your feed. That way you can completely block the YouTube shorts, recommendations and sidebars, and only see the video you've clicked on through the RSS feed. This made a big difference for me.

At this point it's been a couple of months since I started using RSS feeds, and I've seen some significant benefits. Here are a few of them:

With social media, I would get notifications all the time, and I would feel compelled to check them right away. Or I would wake up in the morning and start scrolling right away. With no apps on my phone and RSS feeds on my computer only, I've been able to break these habits. I can now focus on my work and life without constant interruptions.

Social media constantly leads you down rabbit holes you never intended to go down. With RSS feeds, I choose what content I want to consume and I only see that content. I can curate my feeds to make sure that I'm only getting the information that I want. A lot of the time you don't even need to leave your RSS reader to read or watch the content, which is great.

It's amazing how much more time you get when you're not constantly distrated. And it's not just the amount of time, but the quality of it too, since there's no brain fog from all the scrolling and dopamine hits. You get more done and you feel better about it.

This was actually the original idea behind RSS feeds. You can have all your content in one place, organized the way you want it, instead of having to visit multiple websites and apps. But at this point for me, this is just an added bonus.

Well, I hope this gives you an idea of how you can use RSS feeds to replace social media and improve your focus. It helped me quite a bit and maybe it helps you too.

Thanks for reading! 🫐