I Built a Personal Algorithm to Stop Doomscrolling and Curate My Daily Feed

I'm quite sure you're doomscrolling right now. And I want you to take a second and reflect back on the content that you consumed today. How many of them can you actually remember? Probably not a lot. Maybe even none. This actually quite happens to me all the time as well. I spend hours doomscrolling, yet when I try to remember all the things that I just consumed, I can't really remember much. After years of scrolling, I can count on one hand the number of times I ended a session and genuinely felt it was time well spent. I always feel like I want to do everything. I want to know everything. I've a lot of interests, but I actually end up doing nothing and just

go to the default mode of scrolling endlessly. And the advice is always the same. Delete these apps, block social media from your phone, and go back to books. But some of the most valuable, most current, and most niche knowledge exists only on the internet. And the internet is the first thing in history that truly democratized information. And walking away from it means walking away from that. So, the problem has to live somewhere else. So, if there is genuinely helpful content, why do we always keep doomscrolling and ended up watching stuff that we don't even care? The algorithm's entire job is to keep you on the platform for as long as possible. It sourced your feed by what you're statistically likely to tap

next, not necessarily what you're interested in. And the real issue isn't the digital media itself, but the lack of a personal framework for engaging with information outside algorithmic defaults. So, I stopped trying to fight the algorithm and started to ask a different question. If the algorithm is the only thing that is stopping me to get the information that I'm actually interested in, that is going to nourish my brain, and not going to make me feel like I wasted hours and hence wasting my life, then what if I built my own algorithm? What if I curated my own feed? What if I picked the exact content that I get recommended to each day instead of relying on social media algorithms that are designed to feed me more and more

so that I consume endlessly? What if I built that? And that's exactly what I did. And I'm going to show you how I built it, and also walk you through how you can set up your own personal curated feed so that you don't regret every single day spending hours scrolling endlessly. So, I sat down and asked myself, if I designed my feed from scratch, what would it look like? And I actually landed on three sections. The first thing is world news. And this one actually comes from a moment that genuinely shook me. When the Iran conflict started between the US and Iran attacked Dubai, I was actually there. And I saw missiles in the sky for the first time in my life. Even though I was like consuming content hours every

single day, I had not read a single article about the thing happening above my head before it actually happened. The algorithm had every chance to inform me, and it never once decided the news that mattered for me. So, the section one is about the major world news, the geopolitics and economics, only focusing on what genuinely matters and stripping out all the rage baby content. On a big news day, it can be long. On a quiet day, it can be like maybe two items. Important decides the length, never a quota. And the second thing is a section I named after a Japanese word called koyo. It roughly means like the cultivated knowledge an educated person carries, like your own foundation for

understanding the world around you. Because one thing that I realized about social media feed is the algorithm shows you more of what you already watch, so your world like quietly narrows while it feels like it's expanding. It creates this like an echo chamber, and you just like come across the same things again and again, but I want an opposite of an echo chamber. So, I made the section to rotate every day. My koyo has eight domains, and here are the domains. It's going to focus on one topic a day about like three good things to consume, and it's more like a suggestion rather than you need to like go through all of them. So, the third one is just like my personal interest. And this one is just

for pure joy. These are the content that I already watch, and I would scroll like even if I didn't get recommended on these. But the difference is that they are pre-selected and pre-filtered so that I only get recommended like good stuff. And other than these like three big domains, I also have few rules. First of all, there's no short form. It's going to be banned completely. And articles, long-form videos, podcasts, those are welcome. Those are the formats that I quite like. And I only want credible sources that don't create content for rage bait. And I also want to read sources that have clear reasonings behind their arguments instead of presenting everything like a fact. And the way that I want this more

like a daily brief. Rather than I have to consume them, it's more like a suggestions of the picks that I can pick from and I engage with rather than like an online course that I need to go through or something like that. Okay, the specs are beautiful, but the problems is who actually runs it because this needs someone to actually go through internet, pick stuff based on your requirements, filter them, and then present you in a readable format every single day. A regular chatbot like ChatGPT answers when you ask something, but this job needs something that plans the whole thing and then goes and does it on its own every single day. And that category of AI is called an agent and the one that I built this on is

Manifold. Quick context, if you have never heard of it, Manifold is a general AI agent. You hand it a goal and it plans the steps itself and then actually executes them for you. It can browse the web, write code, create files, and delivers a finished output at the end. People use it like to build websites, research reports, presentations, entire projects, which is exactly why it can create the daily digest for me. Full transparency, this video is sponsored by Manifold, but the reason why I said yes to the sponsorship is because of the serendipity. I was literally looking for a thing to build this entire system without complicating things so that everyone watching this video can implement and when they offered the

sponsorship, I was so excited because this is genuinely how you can build this daily digest super simply. And let me show you how. Every single day I get this daily digest, and the first section is all about world news. I had some recommendations about the conflict involving Iran, US, and the Israel. And then we have Koyeo, and the main today was history and geopolitics. And it picked one worthwhile topic, which is how the Strait of Hormuz become a global checkpoint, and gave me three ways into it. And down there we have my interest picks, and we got some recommendations about storytelling techniques, as well as some ADHD tips, and about a latest research about ADHD and neuroscience.

And now this is the most exciting part, because you can actually have this exact thing running literally like by today. I turned my whole system into a one prompt, and I'm giving it away for free from the link in the description below. And I want you to walk through it, so that you can use it after you got the prompt. So, first thing is we want to download Manas to our PC, or even to your phone. Doesn't matter. So, you can download Manas from the link in the description below. And after you download it to your PC or to your phone, now we open Manas and start a new chat. And step two, you get my guide and you paste the prompt directly to the chat. And now the great thing about it is that the prompt tells Manas to interview you

before it does anything. And then it's going to ask questions about what topics genuinely you're interested in right now, and your personal hard knows, like things you want to do never want to see. And you just like answer these few questions, so that personalizes your recommendations. And that's about it. And after that, it just goes out and does the whole thing for you. It researches the web in real time, and you can literally watch it like open sources, read them, and compare them, and reject the ones that don't fit your criteria. After that, it just creates you this digest that is readable and clickable. And the step five is one of the most important steps. It's to create a schedule task. So, when you set a

schedule task on Manas, it's going to execute based on our rules every single day on our set time. You can also adjust like the frequency as well if you don't want daily digests. But, the reason why this is so important is because for a new habit to establish, it needs to be seamless and it needs to be easy. When there's too much friction to acquire a new habit, then your likelihood of you doing the thing is going to significantly decrease. And the doom scrolling is the most automatic behavior on the Earth. So, we want this action to be automatic and that's why you set up the schedule task on Manas so that you don't have to ask for it every single time manually.

It's just going to do it for you every single morning before you even wake up. And now I want to be like honest with it. When I first set this up, actually the stuff that it was giving me was like a little bit random and it wasn't that like personalized to be honest. But, the great thing about it is that you can chat and give feedback on the stuff that it recommended to you. You can, for example, say why you didn't like that thing or maybe the source wasn't that credible or it didn't really give the exact stuff that we were looking for. You can chat about this with Manas and give feedback to it so that it keeps iterating it and it can update the rules for you as well so that you don't need

to like adjust the file, right? It is going to update your preferences, your interests, and your feedbacks. So, it's going to get better and better as you keep using it. And the great thing about this is that it introduces you to topics that you never thought before. And as I kept using the system, I actually started to read about different topics that I've never considered before and that's one of the biggest wins. Even though like it didn't completely solve my doom scrolling, I still doom scroll for hours, at least every single day I get to read and I get to consume something that's interesting that actually expands my mind and nourishes my brain. The everything that you need is in the description. So, my

full prompt is completely free, is in the description, and the link to download Manas is also in the description. All you need to do is take that prompt, put it into Manas, and let Manas do the thing for you. You can sign up for Manas through my link, and you get 1,000 free credits to start with, which is more than enough to build this daily digest for you and keep it running for a while. And you can also use Manas not only for this daily digest, but also to create presentations, to build websites, and also connected with various apps of your own. You can also let Manas to send this daily digest to your email, or maybe to your notion, or your personal preferred like note-taking app. You can customize it way more just

by telling it to do Manas. If you're interested, check in the link in the description below. And the great thing about Manas is that the way that it works and the way that it handles everything for you, you don't need any knowledge about AI. Just download it, paste the prompt, and it's going to execute for you, and it's going to walk you through the steps. It's one of the easiest like AI agents that I've tried so far. There are various ways to use AI agents, but it will require to set up stuff, but with Manas, even if you have never touched AI, you can create stuff and build your own things on the internet, and also create like this personal assistants. Extremely easy. All you need to do is just tell, which

excites me about like the era that we're entering and the possibilities of the stuff that we can create. And I'm genuinely happy to be partnering with Manas for this video. So, if you're interested, check the link in the description below. And thank you, Manas, for sponsoring this video.