Discipline over Doom-scrolling?

One marshmallow now or two marshmallows later? Delaying gratification to achieve a greater good for oneself or the world is a fundamental challenge of adulting, if not THE fundamental challenge of adulting. Convincing myself that something hard is worth it, then really FEELING that it's worth it, is not easy. 

With that said, I'm taking a more serious than usual approach to New Year's resolutions this year. My overall goal is to establish a more functional, integrated approach to work, wellness, and righting the wrongs of the world. More handling, less hand wringing, if you will. 

Hopefully posting about this doesn't jinx my attempts, but SO FAR things are going well. My specific resolutions / actions have been:

1. Make better use of at-the-desk time at work to ensure progress on long-term goals like publishing papers. Towards this end I have dusted off the "JamesWorkLog.xlsx" spreadsheet that Rhonda inspired me to make back in 2023. (It's based on the one she uses to track her writing work.) I can't share the whole thing because parts of it are too embarrassing or profane, but below is a screenshot of part of last week, which went well. 

Something that's making this both easier and more important is that my boss reduced my teaching load by one class for this semester only. So this is my chance to get ahead and I don't want to blow it. 

2. A parallel resolution is to avoid getting sucked into unproductive doom-scrolling. I.e., I can get the gist of our planetary plight and ghastly descent into fascism over morning coffee at home and a few hallway and cafeteria conversations at work. I don't need to constantly traumatize myself to the point of losing focus during the day or losing sleep at night. I want to be informed enough to do my part for citizen resistance while maintaining the ecologist / professor work activities that (I believe) are also a force for good in the world. 

The other motivation for doom-scrolling less is to withhold attention and advertising revenue from the big tech "broligarchs" like Mark Zuckerberg who have chosen to financially support the fascist Trump regime. I still have a lot of room for improvement in this area since, for instance, this blog is hosted by Google, and their billionaire CEO Sundar Pichai is one of the creepy oligarchs who donated a million dollars to Trump's inauguration party as an obvious tithe for the king. 

Specific actions that I have taken so far for digital wellness and ethics are: 

a) I uninstalled the FaceBook app from my phone. 

b) I forbade myself from checking news or social media at work, with the exception of I still let myself scroll bluesky on my phone at lunch. This has been hard but I have kept it up so far and it has already helped me, I think. The temptation to doom-scroll hits hardest when my concentration is needed to complete a difficult or anxiety-inducing task, but when I resist the temptation I keep both the time and the mental mojo I need for the task. 

c) I'm trying to do a "FaceBook fast" for a while (from a few days ago until groundhog day) to see how that goes and if it's something I could do more permanently. There are both pros and cons to that. Like, I reach more people when I post something on FaceBook than when I just post it on this blog and bluesky. But the more read it is on FaceBook the more money it makes for evil Meta corp, abettors of fascism.

d) I removed the ad banners from this blog (today). In 15 years they earned me a total of about $200, and (if I did my math right) over the same time period they earned evil Google corp, abettors of fascism on par with Meta, about $94. Now my blog shall burden Google's servers while giving them nothing in return. NOTHING! On a deeper level it seems like it's always the case that the nearly powerless masses must make great collective sacrifices to finally disempower their greedy masters. Taking down my ads is not a great sacrifice, but it's like, a warm-up for exercising that principle. 

e) I decided to make reading my personal emails a thing again, after about a year of basically never checking the account because I was only barely able to keep up with my work email account. To the extent that I eschew FaceBook I will be more dependent on the old-Internet mode of using email to keep up with family, friends, and if anybody ever comments on my blog. <waits patiently>

f) When I am looking at news or bluesky I'm trying prioritize thoughtful newsletters and blog posts and stuff over the general clickbait articles. Like reading blog posts from historian Heather Cox Richardson and economist Robert Reich. 

Something I haven't done YET, but is on my list to do, is extricate myself from super-evil, F-rated by the Better Business Bureau company "Photobucket," which has been extorting me for $6.99/month for years for hosting my old blog images, heavily watermarked. It was a free service when I started using it in conjunction with my blog in the early 2000s, but then they basically destroyed my blog and held my precious memories for ransom with their black-mirror-like policy change in 2017, earning them the F-rating. 

3. The final resolution thing is "wellness," which I've partially addressed with the above-discussion of how I'm trying to avoiding mojo-stealing doom-scrolling. For physical wellness I'm already in an OK place of getting a bit of daily exercise by biking to work, always taking the stairs at work, paddleboarding or windsurfing whenever I can, and jogging when I can't find time for any other type of exercise. The change for 2026 is just to be a little more pragmatic and less uptight about exercising (like, just choose an activity and do it instead stressing so much over what where and when), and to add the gym at work as another "when I can't make time to get on the water" option.