10 Steps to Start Stepping Away

Days Free of Fic: 1
Longest Streak: 1

I could plan forever but the best way to make progress is to actually start. Which is not my favorite. If you also are trying to limit your fanfiction to less or none I put together the order I’m going to use to decrease my consumption (with the intent to stop entirely).

Each day I’ll post more in-depth about each step and some of the emotions or other thoughts that come up.

I want to make it clear. I’m not assigning in morality to reading fanfiction or reading at all. Similar to many things in life it can be good in moderation. The point of this is not to discuss what moderation looks like as that’s different for other people. For me I’ve determined at this juncture that I want to eliminate fanfiction and the types of writings like it that I end up obsessed over to the point of neglecting other aspects of my life and end up unhappy.

NOTE: Anytime I say AO3, please note I’m not limiting this to that platform, you should do these steps on whatever platforms you are active on. If you aren’t addicted to fic whatever else you might be struggling with figure out how this might flex and fit yours.

Steps to Follow (Easiness to be Determined)

1. Clean up Subscriptions and follows, anything that sends you alerts when something has been update or might draw you in.
2. Clean up AO3 History so you don’t have easy access
3. Clean up AO3 and Browser Bookmarks so you don’t have easy access
4. Clear Browser History
5. Clear out email inbox of any notifications that might remind you when you go to look for that doordash discount code
6. Clean up Kindle and Kindle App of Fics
7. Clean up any other files you have stored or ebooks on other apps
8. Clean up Social Media by unfollowing anyone who frequently talks about things that might trigger you to read fic
9. Create a list of Desires. List off things you want in your life that time dedicated to fic has been preventing. (I looked up my screentime. I read 30 hours of fanfic last week. Thats a lot of time I could be using differently)
10. Recheck everything and Start Ban

Alrighty. that list is simple enough until someone asks if I want to get rid of every single ebook I have of my favorite fics and that honestly makes me sweat. So this is going to be easier said than done for sure.

These don’t need to be done in this specific order if that doesn’t work for you. For me this is easiest to hardest, an attempt to gain motivation. However the create a list of desires is something I plan to do as I implement these steps to start gathering ideas of things that I see when I go about my day and get that pang of, gosh I wish I had done more with that.

Here’s a pretty little graphic to print or screen save as a reminder.

Let me know what step you choose to start with or if you are going cold turkey and doing a full sweep at once.