2026-02-15 15:05:00
First weekly recap for this fun life experiment. To remind you what this is all about: in order to help Kevin get back to a more sane use of his time in front of his phone, we decided to publicly share 4 weeks of screen time statistics from our phones and write roundups every Sunday. Yes, we’re essentially trying to shame ourselves into being more mindful about our phone usage. Let me tell you, it definitely works.
Every time I do one of these experiments, I use the first week to prove to myself that this whole phone usage situation is mostly a matter of being mindful about it, and that if I decide that I don’t want to use the phone, well, I will not use it. And it’s not very hard. Monday to Wednesday, I basically almost never picked up my phone from my desk. It was fully charged on Sunday afternoon, and I didn’t plug it in again till Thursday.
I did use it when I was outside for a couple of minor things, but as you can see from the image below, screen time is reporting 9 minutes of total usage for the first 3 days of the week.
Thursday and Friday, I logged a bit more screen time (had to do a few things that required the use of apps), but also because I started listening to a few podcasts while I was driving. I said I started because one thing I did this week was delete any app that’s related to content consumption from the phone. I think my personal goal for this month-long experiment is going to be to get back to a use of my phone that’s utility-driven and not consumption-focused. The phone should be a tool to do things and not a passive consumption device.
Friday usage spiked, and that’s because I was out on a date, so most of the time spent with the screen on was Google Maps being open while I was in the car. I still tried to be mindful of that, though. I drove about 5 hours back and forth, but I only used Google Maps for a bit more than 1 hour. I also used the browser for the first time this week to purchase a couple of tickets for a museum, and I took a few pictures.
So this is how the first week went. Not included here is last Sunday—I told Kevin we were going to start this experiment on Monday—but I clocked 11 minutes on that day. Not bad.
Now, one consideration about this first week: in order to push my phone usage this low, I had to move some of my normal phone usage over to my Mac, which is how I managed to basically never touch chat apps on my phone. I know this is pretty much cheating, but it was intentional and something I was planning to do only in this first week, and I will move that screen time back on my phone starting next week.
The goal is to find the right balance after all, and I like the process of pushing it all the way down to the extreme and then bringing it back up to some more sane levels.
If you have decided to take part in this experiment, email me a link to your post, and I’ll include it below.
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2026-02-13 20:00:00
This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with David Cain, whose blog can be found at raptitude.com.
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I’m a Canadian blogger and entrepreneur. I started doing this back when I was in a totally different line of work. I was a surveyor for an engineering company, and where I live the industry slows down in the winter because of the harsh cold, so I began poking around on the internet a little more than usual. That led to discovering blogs, and the possibility of doing that for a living.
I had always been into writing, so having a way to publish my thoughts and for interested parties to read them and care was a revelation. That was 2008 or so, when the internet was a very different place. Social media was a niche and nerdy thing, big companies had no idea how to use the internet, and we were not all algorithmized. I miss that time.
Aside from what I write about (see below), I’m into indoor climbing, reading, religion, history, and lifting weights. I’m also into the idea of the “Oldschool Internet.” As you know if you’re over 30, the internet used to feel different than it does now. It was freer, more creative and weird, and less dominated by big platforms and algorithms. I have a deep, deep nostalgia for it and I wish I could recreate that feeling.
When I was goofing around on the internet at work I found a blog about blogging for a living, and one day decided I would do that. I had always been interested in the inner world of the human being. I was always thinking about this conundrum of having mind and a body. You have no instruction manual, and you have to go and live a life and try to be happy. I sat down and listed like a hundred obscure ideas I’d been wanting to tell the world.
What I didn’t realize is that my obsession with the inner human world and managing the human condition was due to having undiagnosed ADHD, which made ordinary life stuff very complicated and difficult. My challenges led me to reading piles of self-help and spiritual-flavored stuff. A lot of it was crap but I did learn quite a bit about making the most of the mess that is human life, and shared what I found.
The blog I started was called Raptitude. It was just a made-up word, combining “rapt” and “aptitude.” The idea is that you can get better at appreciating life, at being rapt by the day-to-day experience of being alive. Many of my posts were little tricks I’d figured out for getting yourself to do things, not realizing it was coming from a rather crippling psychiatric condition. I finally got diagnosed at age 40, after twelve years of blogging.
I always tried to stay away from writing in the kind of mushy, therapeutic tone that dominates the self-help and spiritual space. I wrote about weird and hypothetical things instead, and I found an audience pretty quickly.
This year I launched a second site to help other “productivity-challenged” people. It’s called How to Do Things, and it’s more practical and less philosophical than Raptitude, and is aimed at adults with ADHD.
Today my writing is more focused, less wild. But Raptitude is the same blog it was 17 years ago when I first launched it.
I have ideas all the time and take voice notes when I’m out and about. If I’m home I just mind-dump into a text document.
Later I go through my ideas and find one I think I could actually write about. I play around with it, find an angle, and start typing. I do a lot of moving things around, cutting and pasting. Sometimes I’ll write 3 or 4 thousand words and end up with a 1200-word post. Sometimes I even delete the original idea and just riff on a tangential idea.
It is not an efficient or structured process, it’s just habit. I take forever to write posts, even now. I don’t do drafts exactly, I just barf out the idea, try to find a bottom-line point, then revise what I’ve written to point to that bottom-line idea. I do a couple of passes to try to shorten it, which just as often ends up lengthening it. Then I add pictures with funny captions so people don’t get bored and publish it.
I don’t involve anyone else in the writing and there are typos sometimes.
I have a home office and that’s pretty much exclusively where I work. Everything I need is there, my desk has a lot of space, I have multiple monitors. I play instrumental music. Classical or ambient electronic.
I’ve worked in coffee shops, and I do get inspired by being out in the world. But I always feel guilty about taking up their seats for too long, and the travel time seems like a waste so I don’t do that much.
I have always used WordPress, and self-host on BigScoots. I love the host and am so glad I switched from a large, well-known terrible company I will not name. WordPress is good and a lot less clunky than it used to be.
Today I would just do a Substack. I still might switch to Substack one day. It seems like a well-contained environment that takes eliminates a lot of technical and design considerations that can suck up writing time. You’re also built into a network of other writers and readers.
What I would do differently is learn to make a kind of content that doesn’t take long to make. I take forever to do one piece and it is still hard.
Another thing I’d do differently is define my topic more narrowly. I write about anything pertaining to human life, which makes it difficult to know what to write about, and difficult to do any marketing or intentional growth, because there is no identifiable crowd or demographic that I know would be into my “topic.”
It costs a fortune, all told, because it’s a business and not just a blog. Hosting isn’t bad – a few hundred dollars a year. I pay someone on a monthly basis to update and maintain the site and deal with downtime and crashes and other stuff that used to blow up my life once a year or so. I’m not a super savvy technical person so this is necessary.
The highest cost is the email management system, which is essential for the layers and layers of emails I send. With 40,000 people in the system it costs over $400 a month. There may be cheaper options but switching would be too big a pain. I also have tons of little subscription costs that have become necessary for product delivery (Dropbox for example). Altogether my monthly business expenses are more than my rent.
I make a full-time living from my blog by offering products to my readers. I also have a Patreon.
The whole operation would be way cheaper to run if I didn’t sell anything. I am all for monetizing personal blogs. Good content is hard to make and takes time, and if you want to offer something bigger than blog posts, you have to charge for it or it doesn’t get made.
I am a fan of David Pinsof’s Everything is Bullshit and Scott Alexander’s Astral Codex Ten, both of which are Substacks now. Mostly I read books these days.
I just want to say this was a lot of fun. Not to be the old man in the room but the internet has changed immensely since I started in 2008. Part of what has dropped away (at least for me) has been being in the “world” of blogs. Answering these questions and reading other people’s answers on your site has reminded me that some semblance of that community spirit still exists. Thanks for keeping it alive.
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2026-02-11 16:30:00
«Not sure if this can turn into a blogger's challenge», he said. Well, we can certainly try:
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2026-02-08 02:00:00
I was chatting with Kevin earlier today, and since he’s unhappy with his mindless phone usage, I proposed a challenge to him: for the next 4 weeks, each Sunday, we’re gonna publish screenshots of our screen time usage as well as some reflections and notes on how the week went. If you also want to cut down on some of your phone usage, feel free to join in; I’ll be happy to include links to your posts.
I experimented with phone usage in the past and I know that I can push screen time usage very low, but it’s always nice to do these types of challenges, especially when done to help someone else.
Like Kevin, I’m also trying to read more. I read 35 books last year, the goal for 2026 is to read 36 (currently more than halfway through book number 5), and so I’m gonna attempt to spend more time reading on paper and less on screen. It’s gonna be fun, curious to see how low I can push my daily averages this time around.
John joined and already posted his first entry. Kev and Thomas will also participate in this fun experiment.
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2026-02-06 20:00:00
This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Frances, whose blog can be found at francescrossley.com.
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Hello! I’m Frances, I live in the East Midlands in the UK with my wife, back in my hometown to be near my family. I like stories, spending lots of time outside, history, and being an aunt. Right now I’m into zines, playing more ttrpgs, reading lots of biographies, and am going to take some letterpress printing classes. This year I am looking forward to camping, more reading projects, outdoor swimming, and feeding all the neighbourhood slugs with my garden veg. Just generally I’m interested in creativity, learning, fun projects, and trying new things, then blogging about it. I work in the voluntary sector and adult education, and am training to be a mental health counsellor.
In February 2025 I got into an enthusiasm about the indie web. I’ve been messing around on the internet since 2000 when I started making geocities sites. There have been many different blogs and sites since then but nothing for the past few years. I really wanted to get among it and I went from looking at some Neocities sites to having my blog up and running within hours.
Since then I've had fun adding more stuff to my site, and tweaking things, but no major changes. It took a while to settle into a rhythm - which is upbeat, chatty, 250-ish words, three to five times a week. Now I'm really happy with how it's going and it feels like I’ve only just gotten started. I love emailing with people, taking part in blog carnivals, and so on.
Mostly ideas come from or are about books I'm reading, little projects I'm doing, tv and films, other people's posts, conversations with my niblings, rabbit holes I'm going down, and stuff I enjoy. Writing helps me think, possibly writing is how I think. I try to stay positive and to write posts that are hopefully fun for other people to read.
It’s very off-the-cuff when ideas come up and I put them in a draft, even just a sentence of an idea. There's always a few posts on the go at any one time and they usually get posted within a week. I like a choice of things to be working on - which is true of most stuff, not just blog posts. Some posts like my link roundups or lists of things I've been enjoying are added to over time, then posted when they get to a good length. I've been experimenting with ‘theme’ weeks or series, which has been great fun so far.
I do think the physical space influences creativity. To keep my battery charged I need to be exposed to new ideas: reading, going to a museum, looking at art, doing things. I’ve spent years training myself out of the idea I have to be in the ideal creative environment or state in order to write. I'll write queueing at the shops or on the bus, perfectly happily. It’s more about being able to write whenever I have time or ideas. Ideally, I’d be in a field. I am almost always listening to music though.
There is deliberately very little in the way of a tech stack. I use Bear Blog, which I love very much. My domains are with Namecheap. That’s it. I didn’t want anything to complicate getting started when I was in that enthusiasm. I’m mostly on my phone or tablet so it was essential I could write, post, and fiddle, really do everything, without needing my laptop. I don’t even draft elsewhere - I write directly into the Bear Blog editor because I believe in living dangerously. No backups, we die like men.
Honestly, no. I made decisions - the platform, to use my name - and I could have made them differently but I stand by them. Those are just details - writing, thinking, sharing, contributing, and connecting with people are the real focus.
I’ve got an annual paid plan for Bear Blog which is about £40 a year plus my domain name is about £12 a year. It does not generate revenue and I don’t want or need it to. People can do whatever they like with their personal blogs and I will contribute to a tip jar, buy people’s books or zines, and so on, whenever I can.
This is the toughest question! So many great blogs. Just a few, and I’d love to see any of them interviewed: mɛ̈rmɛ̈r, Sylvia at A parenthetical departure, Ruth at An Archaeopteryx, Ním's memex, Paul Graham Raven at Velcro City Tourist Board, Gabrielle de la Puente and Zarina Muhammad at The White Pube, and Paul Watson at The Lazarus Corporation.
I’m just a big fan of everyone out here rewilding the web with fun blogs, sites, and projects. Including everything you do, Manu, with your blog, People and Blogs, and Dealgorithmed. Thank you for them, and for having me here. Another cool project: Elmcat made an interactive map of the TTRPG blogosphere. Not only is this an amazing technically but it's so inspiring to see the community and all the connections.
Now that you're done reading the interview, go check the blog and subscribe to the RSS feed.
If you're looking for more content, go read one of the previous 128 interviews.
Make sure to also say thank you to Frederick Vanbrabant and the other 117 supporters for making this series possible.
2026-02-05 20:10:00
I told Kevin I was going to write this post since we were discussing this topic the other day. This is my half of the argument; maybe he’ll write an “Adblocking = Piracy” post on his site if he finds the time between one meeting and the other.
I am not the first person to write this post; I am sure I won’t be the last. Plenty of people have expressed their opinion on this subject, and so far, no consensus has been reached (and I suspect never will).
For me, the reason why the two are not the same is very simple. When I pirate something (a game, a TV show, a movie, music, you name it), the original, legal, implied agreement was pretty straightforward: someone created something and put it up for sale, and if you want that something, you have to exchange money in order to get access to said something. There are no ambiguities here, and it’s a fairly simple transaction. That’s how most of society works. There’s a more complex discussion we can have to figure out if piracy = stealing, but that’s a separate discussion, and it’s not relevant here.
With adblocking, on the other hand, the implied agreement is more complex. To start, while browsing the web, I don’t know upfront if the link I’m about to click on has ads or not. So the argument that you shouldn’t use adblockers because you have accepted to be served ads while consuming a specific piece of content is shaky at best in my view. I could see that argument being more valid if ads weren’t displayed straight away, and I was given the option to leave the site before ads were displayed to me, but this is not what’s happening on the web.
Then there’s the issue of what being served an ad means. Do I have to watch the ad? Does it have to be displayed on my screen? If ads are displayed on the sidebar of your website, and I keep that portion of the browser outside my screen on purpose, is that adblocking? I’m literally not allowing the ads on my screen after all. If the ads load and I have a script that, after 100ms, replaces them with pictures of cats, is that ok? If I design an adblocker that grabs all the ads on your page and moves them all to the bottom of the page, and I never reach that portion of the site, is that ok?
The moment your data has reached my computer, I should be free to interact with it however I see fit. And if I decide to strip away most of the junk you sent my way, it’s my right to do so, the same way it was my right to stand up and walk away or change channel when TV ads were running.
Adblocking is not piracy. And actually, I think more people should run adblockers. Actually, all people should run adblockers and force businesses to reconsider how they monetise their content.
But I’ll be curious to hear from the people who are in the “adblocking is piracy” camp. Kevin, go write that blog post.
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