I am not a fan of notifications. They are constant and distracting. This makes them constant distractions. I have turned them off completely for almost all of the apps on my phone.

Email can be the single worst offender of notifications, and unlike many of the others, it is of course not contained to only your phone. In my old job, I had 3 screens at my desk and one of them was entirely committed to having my email open all day every day. I did not have much of a choice. Many of my higher-ups required me to be extremely responsive, and for our clients I wanted to be. Of course, many emails do not need to be dealt with right away, but since some do, we end up treating less urgent emails with an ASAP sense of urgency. This is not good. Also, many people I know have inboxes that look like this - Inbox (25,687). I have preferred to create a system of organization that allows me to empty my inbox to zero at least once a day. I think most people would be surprised by the percentage of emails in their inbox that they can without consequence move to an archive folder without taking any action at all (still totally available and easily searchable of course). The rest can go into other folders by whatever system of organization you see fit, but email organization is not what I am writing about today.

Getting back to the subject described by the title of this post, I would not subscribe to my own blog because I do not subscribe to any daily emails. If I know the blog or daily newsletter or whatever it is is going to share something daily, then the notification that something has been posted each day is not useful to me. Rather, it is a distraction and it makes me more inclined to read whatever it is at the time I receive it rather than at the time when I would prefer to read it, which is whenever I want to.

Of course, I like to think I would choose to read my own blog, but instead of subscribing I would simply add blogofjake.com to my customized start page, start.me (or to bookmarks), like I do for all of the other sites I follow. I would read the post of the day (or yesterday if I am reading in the morning) whenever I want to read it, rather than having it sit in my inbox and feel that because of the form in which it has been delivered it is just another thing that needs to be dealt with.

On a side note, I recommend anyone not happy with their current browser’s start page (likely the default if you read my last post) to check out start.me . I have been using it for a couple of months now and like it a lot. You can pretty much make it whatever you want it to be. I deleted everything it came with to start, and added from there.

Lastly, for my blog in particular, I find the email format to be a bit cluttered and ugly. I am sure that there must be a way to modify that, at least to some degree, but frankly I have not looked into it yet. I just like the way it looks on the blog. I understand and respect the fact that many people have different preferences than I do. I tend to think more about the systems in my life and how they impact me even in the smallest ways. Overthink, one could argue. I am also a contrarian by nature and will generally take the different approach if I believe it is equal to or greater than the common one because I like difference. So if you want to continue to subscribe, I totally understand and certainly do not take for granted the fact that you take time out of your days to read my writing, whenever that may be. I really do appreciate it and I hope that my posts are sometimes useful to you or at least somewhat enjoyable to read, if not both. But that is why I would not subscribe to my own blog.