Ben Guttmann
Between Thanksgiving and New Year’s, it’s officially List Season around these parts. To kick us off, here are a handful of little habits I’ve picked up over the years that have made my digital life just a tiny bit better. Maybe they’ll work for you too?
It’s a cliche to say that SEO has made online recipes basically unreadable. On every blog, before the ingredients, comes a 2,000-word personal essay. It’s annoying – but frankly, the never-ending criticism of it has also become pretty grating. The hot new thing to complain about is how the internet has become an unusable mess of sticky ads, opt-ins, and other junk that crashes your browser within seconds.
So, at least for me personally, I did something about it. I rounded up all my favorite recipes and simply copied them into a Notion database. I copied and pasted ingredients and instructions, added my own notes and tweaks, and even paired it with a cover photo. It works great – no more autoplay videos, endless pop-ups, or dead links. This came in clutch while cooking Thanksgiving dinner this year.
The e-commerce industry has gotten really great at getting us stuff quickly. But sometimes you just kinda need something… eventually. For the things on Amazon that I would like to buy, but am in no particular rush for, I just click a little camel-shaped button on my browser and wait.
Camelcamelcamel is one of those things that always impresses people when I tell them about it. It’s a free little app that provides price history and price tracking for Amazon – that’s it! Either install the plugin or head over to their site and look up anything on Amazon to see its historical price over time and even set up alerts for when it hits a number you want. My wife was confused when I bought an air conditioner in February, but I saved a hundred bucks!
Your birthday used to be the best day of the year on Facebook. There was nothing quite like the dopamine rush of having every random high school classmate and fellow intern light up your notifications.
But as fewer and fewer millennials, and basically zero Gen Zers, use Facebook, we just don’t know people’s birthdays as well as we used to. So, if you have half an hour to kill, go through whatever remains of your Facebook friends list, pull out some of your favorite names, and add their birthdays as a recurring yearly event in your calendar. It brings me a lot of joy to send those little happy birthday texts when they roll around each year.
There’s a shoebox in my closet filled with ticket stubs, ID badges, and other mementos. You probably have one, too. But what about all the nostalgia that exists in the digital world?
To stave off digital decay, I made a folder in Dropbox to house all of that. I exported voicemails from my grandmother, saved Zillow photos from when my parents sold my childhood house, and took screenshots of funny conversations. All of it now lives there, probably for much longer than it would if I trusted it to the whims of a thousand other services.
I once added up how much it would cost for me to minimize my advertising exposure – and it was surprisingly not all that much.
Spotify is $11.99 a month, and that’s a no-brainer. YouTube Premium is $13.99 a month, and it’s worth it just to get YouTube to stop trying to sell me on it. Apple News doesn’t completely shield me from ads, but it gets rid of the worst of them for just $12.99 a month. Streaming options on Netflix, Parmount+, and other platforms are only a few bucks more for the ad-free versions.
I haven’t pulled the trigger for most podcast subscriptions yet, but I just might. And I wish that the EU policies of paying for ad-free social feeds were something I could import here.
So what is that, $50 or $60 a month? That’s a small price to pay to avoid all that noise. (And I get the hypocrisy here as somebody who has made a living making some of it!)
When it comes to money, despite the popular scolding over lattes and avocado toast, the little things don’t really add up. (Just pay attention to your mortgage rates, education costs, and health insurance!) These subscriptions don’t ever amount to serious money, even over the course of years. But the little habits here certainly do add up to big dividends.
