After all of the chaos that befell the tech sector in 2023—from Elon Musk’s militantly ignorant stewardship of the site formerly known as Twitter to the ongoing debate over whether AI poses a grave threat to humanity or just to humans’ jobs—2024 seems set to pick up right where we left off.

The AI theatrics aren’t going anywhere, nor are the crypto indictments or the erratic self-driving cars. And with the 2024 election looming, I don’t want to know what sort of misinformation (AI-generated and otherwise) will fill our social feeds.

Those storylines are mostly out of my control, but there are things within my reach that could improve my own interactions with technology. Here’s a short list of my 2024 tech resolutions.

DEPRECATE SOME DM OPTIONS

Last week, I tried adding up how many apps I use that allow other people to send me direct messages. I got to eight—the Messages app on my iPad, the Messages app on my Android phone, Facebook, WhatsApp, Google Voice, Slack, X, and Signal—and thought that was a bit much.

Then I realized I’d left out Instagram and LinkedIn.

Disabling each of these interruption-generation mechanisms isn’t in the cards—except for Instagram, where you can set the app to discard message requests from people you don’t follow—but I can at least commit to ignoring some of them.

(My task is made a bit easier since I’ve sworn off supporting X after Musk decided to hand a megaphone back to conspiracy liar Alex Jones.)

And any new DM features in apps I use for other reasons (hi, Strava) are completely out of the question.

DON’T BUY AN EV—YET

I am enormously bullish on the environmental potential of electric vehicles, but I’m still holding out on buying one just yet.

That’s because pushing that purchase back to 2025 or later should a) give automakers time to complete their transition to the Tesla-designed North American Charging Standard plug, and b) give us a much wider selection of EVs eligible for the Inflation Reduction Act’s generous tax credits.

In the meantime, our aging Toyota Prius remains one of the more fuel-efficient cars ever made—and the replacement system battery we got in April after the original failed after 126,000 miles should easily get us through next year. And that procurement postponement will also free up some money to replace our gas stove with an induction model.

REBALANCE OUR VIDEO-SERVICES BUDGET

Streaming-TV services are blissfully free of the contract terms and early-termination fees that have plagued traditional pay TV, but the ease of automatic credit-card payments can make it almost as likely that we keep paying for them after their utility has declined.

Meanwhile, streaming TV services have shown themselves no more immune to programming-cost inflation—as in, the entertainment industry seems certain that Other People’s Money is an infinitely renewable resource—than cable and satellite operators.

Our streaming budget is already low, since we have good-enough over-the-air reception to watch the local stations for free with an antenna. But the $40 a month we pay for basic Sling TV service, up from $20 five years ago, warrants a closer look.

We don’t watch nearly that much TV, and our viewing tends to be clustered around particular events, like tennis tournaments (my wife) and postseason baseball (me). That’s an argument for taking advantage of streaming’s flexibility and only paying for the service during those months.

This would offer the added benefit of cutting down our unwilling underwriting of the disinformation machinery at Fox News.

PICK A TWITTER REPLACEMENT

While I’m done with X—seeing how little engagement my tweets now get made it easy to stop posting there in response to Musk’s increasingly unhinged conduct—I’m not done researching replacement options.

I’ve built the biggest post-Twitter audience on Mastodon but have increasingly found that I get better engagement on Bluesky and enjoy the conversations more. I’m much less enthusiastic about Meta’s Threads, mainly because of that company’s history of bad-faith behavior toward journalism.

Next year promises to bring serious shifts for all three Twitter rivals: Bluesky plans to open itself up to public sign-ups, while Threads is moving to support the federated “ActivityPub” protocol behind Mastodon–which will let people on Mastodon join Threads conversations without having a Meta account or using a single Meta app. I would like to see a clear winner emerge from these advances, because I really don’t want to continue using all three platforms in 2024.

MAKE A DECISION ON A MINT REPLACEMENT

After years of neglect that saw nothing change at its Mint personal-finance app, Intuit ended 2023 by surprising users with a much more drastic shift: a plan to close that service and migrate them over to a different personal-finance app based on its Credit Karma service.

But if I’m going to have to export more than a decade of Mint records and learn a new app’s interface no matter where I go next, I’m going to consider competing services. Especially considering how much I’ve grown to resent Intuit’s rent-seeking behavior about tax prep.

Right now, the leading candidate is Simplifi, a $33.48/year, ad-free service from Quicken—which Intuit spun out in 2016—that happens to be a past honoree in Fast Company’s Innovation by Design awards.

Fortunately, I have a little more time to figure this out, since Intuit has pushed back its Mint shutdown date from January 1 to March 23.

I’m sure I will need every week of that time. Because there’s one tech problem that I don’t see easing up in 2024—the way too many too-busy apps and services leave my cognitive load maxed out.