October thirty first
I did something.
Something really risky.
Something I'm deathly afraid of and could cause me a lot of pain in the future.
I re-installed macOS and started fresh.
As any long-time user of Migration Assistant knows, Macs have a great way to transfer your user account from one computer to another. So when you get a new computer, you hook 'em together, and your new one is now just like your old one.
I've been doing this for years. I don't know for how long – probably close to a decade? And mostly because I spent so much time setting up my incredibly complicated and varied local development environments to keep all my projects easily maintainable. Usually all I had to do when swapping computers was generate a couple new SSH keys and install them in the right places.
But after using OmniDiskSweeper, still the best space-waster-finder in the bizz, I found so many tmp files and caches and old application files sitting everywhere in the system. I haven't used Slack in a few years but it still had 3GBs of temp files clogging up the place. That was easy to find and remove, but then there are the 100s or 1000s of files that are only a few MBs that are too small to spend time cleaning up.
So I did a fresh install.
I estimate I saved maybe 25-75GBs of space. It wasn't quite 100, but it was very noticeable after setting everything back up.
After the light feeling of a fresh OS, I was wondering what else I was carrying around? Photos. So. Many. Photos.
Do I really need all my photos from the last 20 years right there in my Photos app? I do not.
So I recently declared Photo Bankruptcy. I backed up everything from the Photos app on an external drive. Then I deleted everything.
Not only did it let me downgrade my iCloud subscription tier, but now when I open photos I'm not assaulted with memories I'd really not remember when I'm trying to send my doctor a picture of that thing my doctor wants to see.
The memories are no longer there, haunting me. Forget the past, move forward.
This probably deserves its own post, but I didn't set up my new phone this year as a copy of my old phone, which I had always done just like with Macs.
I kept it clean. Only installed the bare minimum apps that I absolutely need. If it can be done on a laptop or iPad, I'll do it there instead. I also set it up completely Google-free.
I also got a cellular watch so I don't have to carry the damn thing at all.
The result? My screen time is under an hour per day now, with the exception of FaceTime calls. Nice.
Let's wrap this up with a point: you don't know what you'll miss by holding on the tech baggage of old systems.
My new macOS install had Stage Manager on by default. It's a bizarre windowing system I never thought I'd use. But I ... kinda love it. It lets me focus on a single app at a time, while having the other ones I'm using in view off to the side. It somehow gives you more visibility than using two apps side-by-side as I always had.
Stage Manager. Who knew! Really makes me wonder. What else are we missing by being tech lazy?