Choose Your Signal: Replacing the Scroll With What You Actually Want

It's spring break here, which meant a week spent mostly offline, playing games, going swimming. But a few things at work and at home got me thinking about something that comes before what we do with our time: what we let in. The information that fills the gaps between everything else usually isn't something we specifically chose, we just let it fill, and then the algorithm decides what we see next based on what we already looked at. I'd been spending an inordinate amount of time on Reddit and Facebook community groups, and we wanted to be a lot more intentional about when our phones were out around the kids and when they weren't.The fix isn't willpower, it's choosing the signal instead of absorbing whatever shows up. We replaced the scroll with an automated morning briefing built from categories we actually wanted, and it took the pull to keep scrolling down to almost nothing. This week's Tessera: Pick three to five categories of information you actually want, ask an AI to summarize them each morning, and run it for a week to see if it changes how much you scroll.Read the companion article at https://tesseros.com/tessory-e9-replacing-the-scrollTimestamps:00:45 Spring break and intentional scrolling02:40 Building an automated morning briefing05:40 The second report and pirate movie night07:30 The Time Mosaic launch and website updates09:50 Anthropic Academy and clarifying constraints10:45 Brainstorming course three