I keep an app running on my machine called RescueTime to keep track of what I use my Mac the most for. It turns out, Facebook has been the biggest timesink in my life for the past month. That’s not good.

The first things I do in the morning are check my email, check Twitter, and check App.Net. This is also not good.

So I’m taking a break. From now, until the end of January, I’m cutting myself off from Facebook, Twitter, App.Net, and a lot of the other endless streams that I wade in daily. There’s nothing special about my decision. I don’t expect this to give me some incredible insight about social media, or the human condition, or anything. I just expect it to free up hours of time during the week I can spend doing other things: reading more, writing more, and focusing on my new job. That’s it.

If there’s a greater purpose to all of this, it relates to a theme in 2014 of being more judicious in what I consume online. I vowed a while ago to follow fewer people, and filter my streams judiciously. With luck, I can contain the information firehose and reduce it down to a manageable trickle of valuable stuff. For starters, I just want to turn it off and find my bearings. Instead of wallowing in other people’s moments, I want to focus on my own moments, just for a while, before opening the floodgates again.

For all the folks who follow me on those various service, I’ll see you on the other side. Until then, I’ll be here, and if you really want to get in touch, there’s always the contact form.

My Dad used to keep an 1950 Plymouth in the garage of our Northeast Philadelphia rowhouse. He thought that one day he’d have the time, energy, tools, and whatever, to put it back in working order. Until then, it was just a hulking metal mass that stood in the way of getting Christmas decorations out. The car sat in the garage from before I was born until my early twenties, when he wised up and sold it to a new neighbor who actually restores cars for a living.

I’ve never restored a car. In fact, mechanical aptitude is one of the few things I didn’t inherit from my Dad. My Dad knows how to do a lot of physical, real things. He was a plumbers assistant, a carpenter, an electrician, and for the last decade of his career, a construction inspector for the City of Philadelphia. He could build things and he could rebuild things. Me? Anything more complicated than a LEGO set or IKEA furniture is asking for trouble. Instead, I’m the one they he turns to—the whole family turns to—for tech support. This is why I insisted that my parents buy a Mac not long after I switched.

Michael Lopp recently wrote about “The Builder’s High” he gets from making things. Writing gets him high, and I sympathise. I only know how to build two things, one is an essay, another is a site to host essays. Yet, I’ve only gotten that builder’s high a precious few times in my life. One time was when I was seized by inspiration and threw together a gorgeous mock-up redesign of a friend’s website in Photoshop that never got used. Another time is when I started a novel one night in December of 2008—the same novel I quit to focus on this thing.

Building stuff is hard. I could get all into Mihályi Csíkszentmihályi, and Flow, and all that stuff, but I suspect you’ve read all about that elsewhere. I don’t know if it’s gotten harder since we started, as Rands says, “swimming in everyone else’s moments, likes, and tweets.” There’s nothing stopping us from turning off the stream if we truly want to. Since the Industrial Revolution, there’s always been something more appealing than expending the effort to build things, whether it’s TV, radio, books, or just kicking stones. Time was most everyone learned how to play an instrument, but not everyone wrote music. It takes a certain mindset to want to struggle and beat your head against the wall to make something the world has never seen before. When it’s done, though, it feels great.

It doesn’t feel nearly as good to read a Twitter timeline, or to post on one. It does feel good, on some level, or we wouldn’t do it. We share our moments, and we read others shared moments, and for most people, that’s enough to satiate the voice that screams at us to make something and have it be seen. For people who want to do more, it’s good enough to be dangerous. It takes a little vigilance to keep those moments from devaluing our own. We can drown in other people’s moments, and we can lose our moments by focusing too much on sharing them. There’s a balance to be struck, and it’s harder for some of us to strike it than others. Being aware of this give us something to strive for. I’ll never be as handy as my Dad, but as long as I can build—and rebuild—something, I’ll know I have something to be proud of.

Frank Chimero posted a great piece where he decided to “double down on his personal site in 2014”. [1] Staring down 2014, and looking at the projects I have attached to my name, Frank has me thinking. Why do we silo the things we do? From a technical standpoint, we have a surplus of specialized silos for photos, pithy remarks, long-form writing, and other things because those silos are easy to build and easier to use. There’s cross-polination, but these services are designed to be best at one thing. To post my pithy remarks on Flickr would be a waste, and a pain.

It might also be an inevitable outcome of Merlin Mann and John Gruber’s “Obsession times Voice” theory. If you’re trying to create the greatest blog about the “third Jawa on the left” in that one scene in Star Wars, posting your favorite muffin recipe isn’t going to fit the format. Likewise, if you’re obsessed with muffins and Jawas, and you want to state your opinions on both, mixing the two isn’t going to make for a great blog. If you’re like a lot of us, you register another domain and now you can post about muffins on one place, Jawas on the other, and cross-pollinate whenever there’s something you think both audiences will like.

But that’s just blogging. It does suck having so much of your stuff scattered around multiple domains and services. It’s hard to keep track of it all. It also makes it harder for people who are interested in you, as a person, to get at everything you’re putting out. That’s why I have a link to Crush On Radio in my navigation bar, despite it being a separate domain. I figure if people like what I’m doing here, they might like what I’m doing over there with my friends. Now, there’s a whole separate set of silos around that project: a Facebook, a Twitter, an email account… It’s the same with Above the Runway, which I’m still building out. A few months ago, I finally registered richardjanderson.com to provide an easy place where one can find all my public-facing stuff. Still, it’s Sanspoint where I’ve invested most of my public identity online.

For all of us out there making “content”, a big part of the decision to silo out stuff comes down to whether we want to be known for a project, or as a person. Or both. And, let’s be honest with ourselves: we post stuff on the Internet because we want people to see it. We want to be known for something. We can be known as the guy who’s myopically obsessed with one particular Jawa, or with muffins, or the guy who has so many smart things to say about Apple that their C-level executives have read your work. One does not preclude the other. That said, I’m excited to see what a truly personal site looks like in 2014. How do you bring all of those silos and streams under one banner, one roof, and make it work? I’ll be keeping an eye on frankchimero.com in the meantime, and thinking about what it means for my silos.

An unregulated fiat currency popular among technocrats and open source wonks. If that was all Bitcoin was, I wouldn’t be afraid of it. I just wouldn’t care. Instead, Bitcoin is an unregulated fiat currency popular among technocrats, open source wonks, and hedge funds. That scares me. Wall Street types going nuts over an unregulated fiat currency, considering their track record, should scare anyone.

There’s nothing to prevent fraud, and nothing to stop unscrupulous investors from crashing the currency and running off with the proceeds. Even worse, the very idea of regulation has already popped one bubble in the currency. Still, with people like famed hedge fund manager Hugh Hendry claiming a single Bitcoin could become worth $1 million [1], one can’t help but think there’s plans to inflate that bubble again.

It’s easy to be blinded by novelty. There’s enough people pushing and promoting Bitcoin as the latest technological salve and as a get-rich-quick scheme that I think most supporters are blinded. The dangers are real, and there’s real people’s money being invested in something frighteningly risky. I wouldn’t put even a penny of my money in Bitcoin, and as long as it remains popular among hedge funds and other unscrupulous Wall Street types. I’ll leave it to the technocrats and wonks to get burned instead.

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