I feel like as time has passed and the increasing distractions of modern day it has become harder and harder to exist without something being running in the back of your mind. For example before I started typing this I was looking for a TV show I could play in the background I didn’t need the distraction I didn’t even want it I felt if I could put something on I would be killing two birds with one stone I could clear something off the ever increasing list of things to watch while simultaneously clear out my head writing a rant on how having everything all at once is bad. So now I’m sat clacking away at my keyboard thinking about how I can distract myself I could put a podcast on or music and I think to how being able to constantly distract ourselves from a task has only really been possible for the last 100 years or so. 100 years ago if you wanted to listen to music you could either go to see a live performance, put the radio on or play music from a gramophone. While all these were accessible you could not do that on the move and on top of that there were very few jobs in which you could do these things while working most people worked in environments that were too loud to facilitate audio distractions from the work. If you go back a little further to 1857 and the only way would be live music and since then distractions have only become more and more prevalent which combined with an exponential increase in media to consume has meant that everyone has a backlog whether they are conscious of it or not. I know I have watched many videos about clearing your backlog and gone, yeah that sounds great I should do that but then immediately rather than acting on it left the backlog to grow as I have scrolled onto the next video and the next and the next that’s prior to the endless scroll we have now of TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube shorts which fill our days with tiny dopamine bursts of nothingness which while they make you smile or laugh in the moment and may be deemed worthy to send to your friends have you ever actually gone back and gone I want to watch that again do you think back to your favourite minute clip and go do you know what I should watch that again. Maybe you do maybe you prize that highly but I would hazard a guess that you don’t have a top 5 favourite list like you do for films TV shows and music. So what do we do personally I’m working on trying to reduce my time on apps that don’t give me an actual reward by trying to limit screentime setting up colour filters at set times, using the app limits and setting up screentime restrictions does it work not really but it’s a step in the right direction and the only way to actually get where you want to be is by taking steps in the right direction. I’m also trying to work my way through my various ever expanding lists and ironically it’s by making another list severall of them infact I have started to make a physical list of films, tv shows and things I want to read including what I am currently working on and in those lists if I don’t want to watch one of the things I have written down I am using a random number generator to choose from my online list and I will watch whatever it says. I am also going through my online list and removing the things I have seen before or that I no longer want to watch. I don’t know if this will actually help me but again I think doing these things and making intentional choices to do so is a step in the right direction. Another thing I am doing is this writing a blog about the thoughts I have getting them out onto paper in this case a screen to remove them from my brain. I admit even in the process of writing this I picked up my phone and had a quick scroll of Instagram and sent a mildly amusing post to my friend so making steps in the right direction doesn’t make this a linear path it isn’t a magical moment and everything clicks but if we keep trying we can be better. In writing this I have tried not to fall into a rant there are so many different paths I want to run down sparked from each note I have made but I will keep to this point of intentionality with what we do is important and is something we have been pulled away from with no guidelines on how to find the “correct path” so all we can do is try. I will read through this once to make sure everything is kind of correct but I will not be following the guidelines of how I should write from Grammerly which I will show as a picture how wrong it thinks I am but prior to me giving this a once over it says I am wrong 36 times.