In the waning days of 2014, I seized upon two words for 2015: “Simplification” and “Focus.” They’re concepts that are intertwined. It’s easier to focus on something simple, and the more simple I make my life, the easier it will be to focus on what’s important. Simplification is a process, and focus is the desired result of undergoing said process. I know that my life has become much busier and fraught than I would prefer—and this is coming from a full-time employed, thirty-one year old man in a long-term relationship with no children. It wouldn’t be so bad of those things that make life fraught were things I chose to undertake. Instead, it’s often a lot of stuff I’ve fallen into, or baggage I’ve carried from my past. Time to unburden.

The process begins with unloading (some of) the piles of stuff I’ve accumulated over the years. I’m not about to go all Minimalist Hipster here, choosing to live with some arbitrarily low number of things just to say I can. That way lies madness, and frankly, I don’t want to part with my collection of books, music, and DEVO Memorabilia. These things make my life measurably better to have, as I discovered during two years living with all of that stuff in storage. [1] But there’s other piles of stuff I could get rid of: clothes in my closet I don’t wear (or are so worn out that I can’t wear them), DVDs of movies and TV shows I’ll never watch or can stream, CDs of computer games I’ll never play again, and empty notebooks I’ll never write in—ones that I bought in college.

Okay, it’s largely symbolic, but I’m beginning the process of simplification by just unloading as much of this extra crap as I can. Every single physical thing in my life that doesn’t belong is taking up clock cycles in my brain that are keeping it from other, more important things to think about. This includes my work, my relationships, and even my health. No, the extra, cheap plastic shoehorn that came with a pair of dress shoes isn’t going to kill me, but how many shoehorns does someone even need, anyway? [2] My goal is to have a greater degree of intentionality about the stuff I allow into my life, not just to get rid of stuff I don’t want for its own sake. Honestly, until now, I didn’t even see myself as much of a pack rat. I’m not like those nuts who keep all their old iPhones—and the boxes.

Part of the inspiration to simplify came from Patrick Rhone’s recent talk at SimpleREV. In short, there’s three questions one should ask themselves about the things in their life: “What problem does this solve?”, “How little can I get away with?”, and “Where does this belong?” These go a long way into sorting out the stuff we have in our lives, physical and otherwise. I’m also asking myself a fourth question: “Is this making my life better?” It’s why I’m not parting with any physical media—save for DVDs and old computer games. Having music in a tangible form makes my life better.

What’s not making my life better is what I’m getting rid of. These are the burdens on my back that I’ve carried with my through a decade-plus of adult life. The physical ones are the easiest to remove: hock it, donate it, or trash it. But there’s other burdens I’ve been carrying, and for a lot longer that I have to deal with. That step comes next. Wish me luck.

In the realm of iOS Automation, if Federico Viticci is a Guru, I am merely an Advanced Beginner. But that still might be further along than you. If you’re curious about working apps like Drafts, Workflow, and Launch Center Pro into your iOS life, I’ve put together some advice on getting started.

Pick one app to start

What do you do with your iOS devices? If you find yourself doing a lot of repetitive tasks in various apps, or want to link a bunch of apps together, look into Launch Center Pro. If you type a lot, look into Drafts. If you wish you had fast ways to do various processes on your device, Workflow is for you. If you write a lot on your iOS device, Editorial is a good place to start. It’s easy, too easy, to get overwhelmed by what these apps can do. By picking one app, and one subset of things you can do, you can get your feet wet without going crazy.

Try pre-existing workflows and actions

For Drafts and Editorial, there are huge databases of pre-existing actions and workflows you can download and install to get started. Just scroll though the Drafts 4 Action Directory, or the Workflow subreddit and see if anything there does something you find yourself doing the long way around. Launch Center Pro doesn’t have a directory for finding things you can do with it, but its built-in Action Composer has useful ways to get inside of a bunch of apps with deep URL schemes. It’s worth poking through to see what you can do just with the apps you already have on your phone.

The “biqnx” file

This is something I stole from Merlin Mann. I keep a note file tagged “biqnx” (for “Bugs, Ideas, Questions, and Notes”) that stores every thing I want to know how to do in a certain app. Every so often, go through that file and see if you can’t either find a pre-existing solution to integrate, or make your own. I know from my experience that I’ll often think: “wouldn’t it be nice to do $thing with my phone,” and then forget about it. Having a biqnx file gives me a place to quickly stow ideas, and set them up when I have time to experiment. And even when I don’t, it gives me something to crawl through action directories for.

Experiment

If you use your iOS devices a lot, it’s worth your time to check out at least one of these apps and see what it can do for you. Just go start playing around. Sure, if you’re sinking more time into coming up with workflows and actions than working, it might not be worth it, but I trust you. Pick an app that suits what you do a lot of, and dive in. Just don’t let it keep you from actually working.

In the absence of strong anti-harassment tools on most major social networks (though Twitter recently promised to improve its blocking function), group chats preserve a corner of the internet for empathy and understanding, intimate emotions that seem to have less and less of a place online. Our small tide pools shelter us from a utopian promise of Suler’s 90s-era internet—instant connection with all humanity across any distance—that has since become a threat.

— The Only Truly Intimate Online Experience Left

People were never meant to live 100% in public. We’ve always had circles and groups that we choose to interact with to different degrees. Facebook, Twitter, and their ilk either don’t understand, or choose to ignore this fact. The future of “social” isn’t a monolith, but overlapping and nested circles of people. The companies that get it, will earn huge dividends. The ones who do not will fall onto the dustheap of history.

I’ve long maintained that so many of the horrors of the Internet Age are not new ones. Harassment of women, of minorities, of LGBT people, none of these are new. Even the methods are largely the same: death threats, intimidation, and revealing of personal information. What is different about harassment in the Internet Age is that awful people now have far more reach, with far less effort. By any measure, 2014’s biggest Internet hate campaign, GamerGate, has only a few hundred members, but has leveraged weaknesses in technology to amplify their voice of hate to what sounds like a mass movement.

But the same tools that extend the reach of hate, also extend the reach of love. Some of us in the technology space on Twitter roll our eyes when we see the latest sociological outrage flow past us on our timelines, but Twitter and similar online spaces are fast becoming places where the victimized can find people who are able to support them, and amplify their voices above those of their attackers. Through services like Tumblr, and even Reddit, a transgender teen can find the support they don’t get in “real life,” though often it’s not enough to save them.

When you’re not in the space occupied by marginalized voices, and they penetrate our bubble, it can be frustrating. “Why do I need to hear about people being harassed online? This isn’t what I come on Twitter/Facebook/Tumblr/Reddit for!” This is why I’m convinced that half of the volume of Internet Outrage is people being outraged over the other half of the outraged expressing their outrage. Where others see an annoyance, I see those bubbled up voices as the Conscience of the Internet: a voice poking through the mundane din of our feeds to remind us of our humanity, and our duty to others. The only way we can reduce the reach of the horrible people is to expand the reach of the victimized.

Two decades into the mainstreaming of the Internet, there’s still no shortage of eye-rolling over Internet Activism. It’s true that Internet Activism with no real life component is largely ineffective, but if there’s one thing that Internet Activism is good at, it’s amplifying the voices that would never be heard through other means. We can cultivate, mute, and prune our feeds like tending a vegetable garden, but no matter what, something uncomfortable will still bubble though. It’s what we do with those discomforting moments that creates our online social conscience.

“I don’t think my definition has changed. But the world where that definition made sense has definitely passed,” Reichelt says. “The sense of wonder has kind of gone now, I think.” What’s changed isn’t so much how we interact with others online but the scale at which it happens. “The volume is much greater,” Reichelt says. “Now, keeping up with people non-stop on social media is mundane, not a novelty.”

Reichelt made repeated reference to the increased “noise” online today, a striking contrast with the previous use of “ambient.” Ambient is supposed to be unobtrusive and pleasant, as musician Brian Eno originally defined it. Ambient anything should be “as ignorable as it is interesting,” he wrote in the liner notes to his Ambient 1: Music for Airports. The online socializing that first defined ambient intimacy has since become both unignorable and uninteresting.

—Kyle Chayka, “How Ambient Intimacy Became So Overwhelming”

Our social media is only as obtrusive as we let it be. The problem is that it’s more beneficial to the services we use for this “ambient intimacy” to force themselves deeper into our lives, to nag us and prod us into checking our feeds and posting, so they get more eyeballs to monetize. The only way to reduce the scale of online interactions and bring back the joy is to do it yourself. Turn off notifications, uninstall the apps, set a time, and escape the ambient noise of “social” until you can approach it on your terms.