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It’s easy to get lost in the clutter of social media. Unfortunately, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram don’t usually make the spring cleaning to-do list.
You don’t need to wait for warmer weather and longer days, though, to cleanse your feeds.
Masses of people have already emptied closets, cupboards, and storage spaces in the name of Marie Kondo, the Japanese organizing expert whose Netflix series Tidying Up with Marie Kondo launched a nation of domestic gods.
Now, using the same method of relinquishing objects that don’t “spark joy,” Julius Tarng launched Tokimeki Unfollow—a Twitter plug-in that expedites the scrubbing of your news feed.
Tarng, a former product designer at Facebook, introduced the service this week.
“So everyone was joking about KonMari-ing their Twitter, but I went ahead and made a tool for that,” he wrote in a Monday post. “If you’ve ever actually KonMari’d anything, you’ll know that it takes a LONG time and a LOT of hard decisions.”
The process consists of gathering all of your belongings, one category at a time, then keeping only those items that “spark joy.”
Pick up an item of clothing, for example. Look at it, hold it close, ponder its existence, and see if you get a warm, fuzzy feeling inside. If so, fold it neatly (Kondo can teach you how) and put it away. If not, thank it for its service, then place it gently in a pile to donate or discard.
Similarly, take a moment to look through The Muppets’ latest tweets, determine their importance to your daily life, and keep or unfollow.
“I’ve been working on this tool for three weeks and I still haven’t finished KonMari-ing my 1,000 initial follow” list, down to about 600 early this week, Tarng admitted.
Yes, you can scroll through the Twitter app to do the same thing. But there’s a certain urgency to Tokimeki Unfollow that helps drive the process and insists you cut the digital fat.
Over an agonizing 20 minutes, I chose to unfollow Emma Watson, Allison Janney, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Hillary Clinton, among other prominent accounts. Not because I don’t appreciate, respect, and enjoy these people. But because I know I tend to skim past their tweets on the rare occasions I actually look at Twitter.
In the end, I whittled my feed down from 146 follows to a svelte 90 (mostly family and friends to whom I feel an obligation).
Tokimeki Unfollow makes it easy to sit with someone’s tweets, hug them tight, then say thank you and goodbye.
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