3 weeks of laundry, vacuuming, garbage bin refresh, returning books to my shelves, cleaning up: I was thinking of doing these during the weekend but none of that happened. Instead, I finished The Saint of Bright Doors (read my Goodreads review on it, I was feeling very strongly when I wrote is as that was just after I finished it, and after watching a video with a negative review of it which I totally disagreed with), talked to my mother, feasted on leftovers, and tried to clamp down on my mindless social media scrolling addiction while not entirely removing my access to social media (which I might need for venting, ranting, raving, and other such necessary content creation).

So basically I dreamed of a way where I had one place where I can find all my social media account post creation UIs and where I can still see comments, notifications, and messages but not see any of the feeds. Yesterday I tried accomplishing that with my blog, by installing a social media autoposter plugin, but Instagram was being greedy with its API so the plugin required that I turn my IG into a Business page and have an equivalent Facebook Page to set everything up. That was a bit too much for me so I rage quit and slept on it.

This morning, in a haze of madness because I once again found myself scrolling through IG, I searched for something about removing scrolling on mobile (I already knew that a feed eradicator existed for YouTube–gone now, but I knew the concept already existed) and found this single Reddit reply that said “The only thing that worked for me was Firefox on mobile, with the SocialFocus plugin.” There was one reply that said that was exactly what worked for them as well.

I ran with it. SocialFocus apparently allowed you to fully customize what appears on most of your social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.), so you can say you want to see everything except the feeds, which is what I did because that was the only thing tripping me up. This is really a great way to prove to myself once again that you can create technology to cure the ills of other technology. Someone just needs to develop them. If that technology doesn’t exist yet but you need it, then maybe that developer has to be you.

SocialFocus does not include Tiktok, however, Tiktok has a section under Settings that allows you to set daily timers and sleep reminders, so with that, I was all set. I just made sure I had the same setup in my tablet and my desktop. In addition, though this is something I set up only yesterday, I had bought Cold Turkey way back when so that I can set time limits to when I can see social media sites.

Now to find new addictions! It will take a while for me to not get angry enough to try and circumvent everything I set up for my future self, but I will try and steer that energy into reaching out and reading a book instead. See how I finished the last quarter of a thick book in 4 hours. I’ll take it. There are way worse things.

The laundry’s still undone, by the way, but today’s still a win.