Declaration of Intent

A few weeks ago I completed an absolutely ruthless culling of my Google Reader subscribed feeds list; now following 82 feeds, down from a lifetime max of 803. Last weekend I caught up on the remaining 450+ unread items from the feeds that made the cut, mostly belonging to friends, coworkers, and local acquaintances. Earlier this week, I used Nest.Unclutterer to screen my follows and followers; yesterday I broke Twitter silence for the first time in six months. I've budgeted an hour a day to deal with my primary GMail account, all of which is currently directed towards an Inbox Zero system that works for me. I even dragged the Tumblr bookmarklet back onto the Firefox toolbar so I could post some links and ditch the associated emails once and for all.

Consider yourself warned, internet. I've spent too long staring at source code, letting your pathways become overgrown while a feral glint creeps into the eyes of your denizens. Perhaps my metaphors have even become brittle and strained, with descriptions both baroque and byzantine.

I had a nice little online life set up for myself once upon a time, but I let it all slip away while in the grip of a horrible addiction to work. I'm not going to claim that I no longer have a problem; I expect I'll be fighting this particular addiction for the rest of my life. (Like my oxygen addiction, it can be dangerous to avoid the source of the dependency too completely.) I'm still having difficulty making the tough decisions that must be made on the way to Inbox Zero, and I can't even think about Facebook without pangs of guilt for the messages from old friends and high school classmates that remain unanswered. Every site I have needs a facelift, or at least some botox for the CSS. I have an entire Google Notebook specifically for sites and projects I'm unlikely to ever reclaim.

I'm not going to let it overwhelm me any more, though. I'm taking it back ("Net Monkey 4 Life?") one site at a time. We will fight them in the feed readers! We will fight them in the social networks! We will fight them in the blogs and sharing sites. Let the cry be, "No surrender!"

Or, um, something like that. We now return you to your regularly scheduled lack of programming, already in progress.