Hey Friends,

I have a lot of fond memories from growing up in the 80s. Despite spending most of my weekend outside I also found time to watch a lot of TV. Saturday's in particular were my favourite with the morning's usually consumed with Saturday Superstore (I fancied Sarah Greene) followed by a dose of Saint and Greavsie after lunch to catch up on the latest football news, before the piste de resistance: British wrestling - nothing beat a Big Daddy vs Giant Haystacks bout.

Back then what you watched, and when, was dictated largely by the TV stations. The amount and variety of programmes was also limited and followed a set schedule; if you were not home when a programme was on you generally missed it.

Fast forward to today and a lot of has changed about the way we consume media. Obviously, the amount and variety of content has grown massively. But, with the addition of streaming services you could now also watch TV 24 hours a day and still never watch everything on offer. In the case of services like Netflix and YouTube it is now also hugely profitable to keep us hooked and consuming more and more content, hence why many of these tools and designed to exploit human psychology and tap into our many weaknesses and addictive tendencies.

Today I take pride in the fact that I watch very little TV

However, it has taken a while for me to admit, but in many cases I have just replaced TV with YouTube. It is my guilty pleasure, and also my Kryptonite (does that make me Superman).

So I am on the hunt for strategies to help me regulate the amount of time I spend on YouTube. Here are a few suggestions that I found online and my initial thoughts on whether they would work for me:

• Set clear time limits and boundaries - From experience, this will probably not last
• Be selective on watch you choose to watch - This pits willpower against the YT algorithms so is probably going to fail
• Build in breaks - I will likely ignore these
• Remove the app from your phone - This has merit and requires further exploration
• Only watch on a Computer - As above
• Schedule days off - Requires discipline but could be effective
• Watch videos at double Speed - This would just double the amount of videos I watched so not really solving the issue
• Use an alternative platform - I have briefly looked at Odysee, Bitchute and PeerTube and while they do have some merits the user interfaces are generally very clunky
• Use an RSS feed to pull videos to your computer rather than logging into YouTube - This could have some merit and requires further exploration

Over the coming months I intend to try some of these strategies and also explore some technological solutions so I will keep you posted. For now, I think the answer may lie somewhere between my 80s TV experience and using YouTube as a digital library rather than a substitute for TV.

Have a great week.

Take care,

Chris

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Things I've found interesting this week

\\ One Link: Could the UK depart from GDPR as part of Brexit

\\ Two Link: Iris scan serves as traveler ID at Dubai airport

\\ Three Link: Malicious apps on Google Play dropped banking Trojans on user devices

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If at first you don't succeed; call it version 1.0

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