As many of you may have heard, I was mostly offline for a matter of several weeks, especially with very limited access to LinkedIn, but also to my mail. My communication was mostly forced back to phone and digital calls (WhatsApp, Google Meet mostly). And to my own surprise, it turned out a far more productive six weeks than before!

To return to the digital world, this week I got also had to reinstall my laptop and review my mails 🫣 With additional learning curves.

e-Mail

Again, I assume it’s something you heard from me before. For many years now, I restricted myself to 10 (ten) mailing lists. The RSS-feeds mostly dried out anyway. But I found it interesting to how many mailing lists I got “signed up”. No, I didn’t do myself. I simply got added to. Got to be kidding I thought when my (intentionally) unfiltered inbox (previously filtered) for those six weeks flooded my new mail app with 13 000 e-Mails. Excuse me? On about 45 days, that’s more than 280 mails a day?

Well. Running a spam filter over it, after reviewing the spam to filter back ham (good mails incorrectly identified as spam), I added some 30 senders (including mailing lists. For a total of 2.493 “remaining” mails. Still some 55 mails a day. Now filtering mass mailings (mailing lists I thought not to trash but filter into a specific folder), it reduced to 114 mails. Very manageable. Of which I have missed four in those past weeks. Nevertheless, that is less than 1% of the e-Mail that flooded my mailbox. And yes, there are additional counter-measures on the mail-server.

Social Network

LinkedIn

Every day, I already limited my activity to LinkedIn to two hours a day. Before. Now those weeks, I made those two hours about every three to four days. And found I may have missed out thousands of “news” in my feed. But I started reaching out one-on-one which turned out rather more productive. Including feedback that those people from my network have not seen much of my posts in the past months. So what was that back in 2020 about the half-life of social media information?

On my few posts, LinkedIn praised for the many “viewers” they got, but the responses have been and remain limited. I’ve reached out before and it’s the ever-same 5-10 people that do respond to my posts.

So if you want to make sure I see your post, please “mention” me. It doesn’t mean I’m not interested, it’s simply that I will try to focus my life more on the real world again and given the flood of posts in my feed, I may simply miss out on it. And if you suddenly find yourself no longer linked-in with me, it’s not out of desinterest, but simply as I haven’t established the personal link. And if you post interesting thoughts, I sure will keep following you. And yes, I will have saved your contact data. You know, mine is on barthel.eu available … I hope 😊

Blog

So what about this blog? The interesting part is, that I have thousands of monthly viewers, but again, the ever-same 5-10 people that do respond to my posts. But long ago, I decided to use the blog to summarize and organize my own thoughts on those topics. So I write in fact for myself. And if you find that helpful for yourself, you’re very welcome.

But yes, the feedback, strong in the beginning (back more than 15 years ago) faded as well.

So recently my WordPress-Theme crashed, no longer being updated. So I replaced it “temporary” with the current sub-optimal one. Let’s see how long that holds, given that I don’t prioritize the blog either…?

My To-Do List

So while no longer prioritizing LinkedIn or the blog, I will keep writing the blog, for the mentioned reason. To summarize and organize my own thoughts. I also plan to experiment with a VLOG. But that’s neither on my priority list. So far I use my little studio for web-calls (WhatsApp, Google Meet, Zoom, etc.). Let’s see how that will go.

I also gained too much “Connections” on LinkedIn. People I that reached out to me, I thought to likely be “valuable” but who turned out “dead baggage”. So I will reach out and see if they respond. Or remove them. They still can follow me, right?

Else, I refocus my personal efforts to people that do communicate with me one-to-one. Digital or face-to-face.

And yes, I think that might be

Food for Thought
Comments welcome!