Staying Focused in the Digital Chaos: My Personal Guide

The Internet is wild. It’s like living inside the universe of Star Wars: we have well-known planets and hidden corners in the Outer Rim. Everything constantly evolves, and it’s impossible to explore it all, so opening a browser can feel overwhelming.

Over time, I felt the need to create a guide for myself. Maybe anyone who spends hours at a computer can relate. What follows is my subjective roadmap on how to use the internet healthily and effectively for me: my perspective shifted moving from backend developer to PhD researcher in machine learning, so consider this just a starting point.

Time and energy should be devoted to concepts, not technologies. For me, one of the hardest challenges is fighting Shiny Object Syndrome [1], so I created a list of tools to use every day as a memento mori to remind myself what truly matters, knowing they’re only a means to an end and that the outcome is what counts:

• browser : Brave
• search engine : Brave search
• note : Obsidian
• email : Gmail
• data storage: external SSD
• code editor : Zed
• 2FA & pass : Bitwarden
• OS : macOS
• LLM: Chat GPT

Having tried virtually every browser, I’ve settled on Brave as the best compromise for my needs. (but I’m genuinely excited about LadyBird) The same goes for chatbots: there’s a new feature dropping every day (for example, Claude 4 just launched), and although it’s tempting to jump between them all, I deliberately stick to one tool unless I truly believe a feature is game-changing.

Regarding AI, we could digress at length on how to use it, but in brief my approach is to employ it while preserving my critical and creative thinking, always verifying the generated output and requesting supporting sources (I’ve listed some interesting articles at the end)

On a similar note, I use macOS and iOS as my operating systems, a trade-off between privacy, security, and usability. Though I’m a huge Linux enthusiast, there are times when I need raw power, and an M4 Pro makes a world of difference. The fact that macOS is hardly customizable might frustrate some, but for me it’s a benefit: inevitably, every time I start tweaking or personalizing something on Linux, I tumble down an infinite rabbit hole. As fun and fascinating as that is, it distracts me, so I appreciate the simplicity and “guardrails” that Apple’s ecosystem provides [2]. This simplicity or Digital Minimalism [3] is something I pursue also in other tools, like Zed and Obsidian, and in my personal life.

First of all, I’ve almost completely stopped using X and Instagram. I only use YouTube and Reddit and I use them actively. I have a “social-hide” extension that removes the home feed and subscriptions, leaving only the search bar. That way, I actively look for what interests me, like my favorite YT channels (e.g., Fireship or Computerphile) or my top subreddits feed sorted by upvotes such as r/MachineLearning or r/LocalLLaMA.

To stay up to date with tech in general, I use only Hacker News. I know I’ll miss some stories, but that’s fine, anything truly important always ends up there. This approach lets me follow the blogs I care about without using RSS feeds. Whenever I find an interesting article, I read it right away; I never use “read later,” because I tend to accumulate too much content I never actually get to. For this reason, I carve out about an hour each day usually in the evening before I log off work for YouTube, Reddit, and Hacker News.

Another thing that helps me avoid feeling overwhelmed by information is treating my phone purely as a utility tool, not an entertainment device. Right now on my phone I have installed only Obsidian, WhatsApp, Maps, Uber, Spotify (which I suppose counts as entertainment), and Safari with the “social-hide” extension installed, nothing else. Of course, there are moments when I get bored, and that’s fine; a little boredom is normal and even helps me relax.

Ads are another way we get overloaded with information: there are far too many, they’re often too long, and usually for products I don’t care about. I do my best to avoid them wherever possible, it’s easy with Brave and on Spotify I pay for Premium so I’m completely ad-free.

Finally, staying up-to-date with the latest research and newly published papers is hard, it feels almost impossible. When I was on Twitter/X, I followed @_akhaliq, who posts the highest-voted ML papers of the day in Hugging Face(see https://huggingface.co/papers) Fortunately, they also offer a newsletter, which I subscribe to, so I can keep up with it without using X. Throughout the day I search Google Scholar for papers on my specific topic, but Google Scholar alerts still send me a lot of irrelevant notifications. I’m still hunting for a better, more automated solution to keep up with the papers that actually matter.

In conclusion, the strategies I’ve shared here are my way of managing the overwhelming nature of the internet. By focusing on tools that serve my needs, sticking to a few key platforms, and practicing digital minimalism, I’ve found a way to balance my online and offline worlds. Writing down my approach helped me stay organized and reflect on my approach and how to improve it [4]. I hope you found some interesting ideas for yourself as well. Thank you!

Notes

[1] Tim Urban, “Why Procrastinators Procrastinate”.https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/10/why-procrastinators-procrastinate.html.

[2] antirez, “We are destroying software,” https://antirez.com.

[3] Cal Newport, “Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World” https://calnewport.com/on-digital-minimalism/.

[4] Paul Graham, “The Need to Read,”, https://paulgraham.com/read.html