How I stopped LinkedIn hijacking my attention and creativity so I can stay focused on artist development and music production

What’s wrong with content lately?

I’ve taken a stand against generic and culturally self-validated information hijacking my attention and battering my subconscious with things I should believe, and advice for how to do things.

I believe that tools like GPT have awoken a new level of brutality in me when it comes to not accepting bullshit when I’m looking for an answer to a question, or to solve a problem. I cover this in my recent article about how to cut fluff from YouTube.

Using the internet (in the last half a decade or so especially), all I’ve been seeing are feedback loops between social media, search engine results and now even AI-generated content. These rehash over information and advice about the “correct” way to do things, which it often isn’t correct.

Application of that advice is usually to attain some form of “success”, which is insanely hard-wired towards an Americanised capitalist idea of success. This shit is bad for our souls.

What’s more, all of the narratives seem to come from “the top” of industries. It’s not even like it’s a revolution of post-San-Fran self-empowered entrepreneurs going their own way…

Why I’m dramatically changing my approach to LinkedIn content

My highest-performing LinkedIn posts have typically been me complaining about the music industry in some way, or explaining why my story has been a bit of a struggle.

These posts, whilst generating hundreds of reactions, didn’t actually convert into any new business. They were, effectively (as far as the core purpose of LinkedIn is concerned) pointless.

That said, I don’t truly believe that. I have something to say – and LinkedIn has, for a decade now, been my place to express it. Because I express it, people come to recognise that I have something to say. That’s still important – and I’m working out how to better manage that as I shift into identifying as an author.

The real problem I’ve had with LinkedIn posts is that, whilst technically evergreen, they are disconnected and invaluable beyond their initial shelf life. The seed idea is not so invaluable because you can just keep rehashing the same idea over and over again written in a different way. That can actually be a solid strategy and good way to sharpen up your opinions and thoughts on a subject, but it’s also quite high-maintenance, especially when you have a pretty solid and extensive understanding of a topic already. I can only tell artists that what they believe they need to be doing for their artist development career is probably implanted in their brains by the major labels, digital distributors and Spotify, so many different ways, before it gets boring. This, I realise, is where I’m at; and creating the right products and articles to serve this realisation is my goal now.

The way I want to provide value to artists now looks more like:

• My website: which looks cohesive, branded and personal. I have ownership and can control how things are connected together.
• My books and essays: long-form writings about topics with deep business, personal and productivity-based explanations that are both critically extensive but also applicable.
• Producing music: I produce Future Garage music and will be doing so for more artists.
• Writing articles: for more immediate writings that are released without a paywall (such as this one).

I teach artists to focus on the creation, and to create something of high value. I teach them that content creation should barely bear a thought. I want to live with that integrity myself.

I’m meditating more. I’m reading more old books. I stopped talking to robots beyond getting a pointed answer. I stopped trusting modern psychology.

I disrupted my “content machine” mindset

I can write about anything. I do write about everything (I journal in real-time in a Tools for Thought app). So, it was easy for me to take an idea or be triggered by a topic and then convert that into LinkedIn posts. This became my standard response to a thought for the past few years.

I had a voice, great. But it wasn’t converting into much that was tangible.

It’s hard to justify being paid for your ideas alone. Especially when the startup world enforces that ideas aren’t valuable unless they’re applied. There’s truth in this, but there’s also truth in the value of ideas. I believe this will become more evident in the coming era of “robotic ideas” we’re about to face, where ideas are generated borrowing from the memories of ideas past in the form of LLMs.

Therefore, I want to inject those thoughts into something tangible: art (music itself), philosophy (my personal reflections on topics and how they guide my daily thoughts and actions), products (things applicable directly in the music industry).

I deleted the LinkedIn app from my phone

This happened months ago and was very important because it disrupted me checking LinkedIn first thing in the morning (for a while, I’m now doing it via the browser 💀).

What I’m looking for when I wake up and want to check feeds is dopamine. The way dopamine works is in the build-up and anticipation of a win, then a huge surge of it as you’re about to win. If you don’t win (and actually if you do win too), you get a dopamine drop for a while that you have to recover from. This basically continues until you get another little win. If you check your LinkedIn and emails as soon as you wake up and the results aren’t what you hoped for, you’ll get an immediate dopamine dump and it’ll be a bit more difficult to even get out of bed. It’s definitely better to throw your phone to the other side of the room into a laundry bin or something and then sit up and do some Wim Hof breathing.

Deleting the LinkedIn app is helpful in other ways too. The main reason I kept LinkedIn on my phone for so long was because I could quickly draft and schedule posts. Seemed productive, but I don’t want to do that anymore. That means I didn’t need a reason to keep the app and successfully deleted it months ago.

This does, unfortunately mean I can’t verify my profile because LinkedIn needs me to scan something via the mobile app. Not doing it. What a shame. 🙄

I disabled the LinkedIn feed and news

Now for the real stuff.

I found a browser extension called Feed Blocker for Linkedin.

Thank me later.

I stopped the annoying “impressions” notifications I don’t care about

Little things drive me the most crazy, and one of those is being told how well my posts are performing. After they’re posted and out of my control, I really don’t give a shit. LinkedIn insists on showing you these posts to the point they have disabled the ability to delete them (let alone disable them).

This has annoyed me enough to create a script that forces a redirect to the “My Posts” filter of notifications every time it tries to access the higher level notifications filter.

It’s not perfect and it escapes the net sometimes, but it’s enough to do the job mostly.

You’ll need a browser extension called TamperMonkey (which I massively recommend for so many reasons). This basically allows you to alter the script in websites to experience them in a preferred manner.

Then, add this script to a new script and then save it:

// ==UserScript==
// @name        LinkedIn Notifications Redirect
// @description Redirects LinkedIn notifications page to a specific filter
// @match       https://www.linkedin.com/notifications*
// @license MIT
// @version 0.0.1.20220623163210
// @namespace
// ==/UserScript==

// Function to check and redirect URL
function checkAndRedirect() {
    // Check if the current URL is the notifications page or the "all" filter
    if (window.location.href === "https://www.linkedin.com/notifications" || window.location.href === "https://www.linkedin.com/notifications/?filter=all") {
        // Redirect to the "my_posts_all" filter
        window.location.href = "https://www.linkedin.com/notifications/?filter=my_posts_all";
    }
}

// Call the function immediately
checkAndRedirect();

// Create a MutationObserver to watch for changes in the URL
var observer = new MutationObserver(function() {
    // Add a delay before checking and redirecting the URL
    setTimeout(checkAndRedirect, 500);  // 500 milliseconds = 0.5 seconds
});

// Start observing the document with the configured parameters
observer.observe(document, {childList: true, subtree: true});

I also played around with hiding the LinkedIn logo icon and the home icon, which I nearly got right but it wasn’t quite solid enough to share. Maybe I’ll come back to edit and add to this article in the future.

Conclusion

Not everyone will be ready for this level of blocking out the world, I appreciate. But it’s a good place to be.

I’ve also done similar hacks for YouTube and Google search results pages, that redirect from the homepage to subscriptions and allow me to block specific domains from results respectively.

I don’t believe that our brains are equipped for the level of information that we’re exposed to. The marvellous things that they are, they adapt of course, but I don’t believe that’s doing us favours.

Freeing oneself to only be exposed to information and people we want to give access to is a good mental health practice associated with boundary-setting.

My online environment is an extension of my own brain and thoughts. I don’t want whoever they like just walking through that posting up adverts and unfunctional user experiences whenever they like. I want to be able to choose who I let in. I want to be able to choose to answer my proverbial telephone without a blaring “online” status that directly shows I’m ignoring the call.

My internet attention needs to become more like my physical home, where outside things can only come in when invited.

If you’re an artist who’s interested in overcoming procrastination and cutting out distractions so you can focus on making music, you can work with me directly as a coach for a monthly fee.