So, I guess I’ve been talking about fasting and what I’ve been consuming a lot on this blog. Well, here’s another spin on that – the information fast.
I’ve gone through periods in my life when I’ve been a total information and news junkie. There have been times, mostly in college and immediately after, where I have been so hooked on reading news and articles that I almost haven’t been able to get anything else done. While this can be good in certain ways (every now and then it does pay to be informed about current events), and you get to read some pretty fascinating articles (such as this one) for the most part this just absolutely kills my productivity.
To give an idea of the scope of my newsiness, it used to take me 2-3 hours in the morning to read through the articles I would get from Truthout.org (my favorite national news source), EnvironmentalHealthNews.org (my favorite non-politics news source), and The New York Times. I guess those couple hours weren’t that big a deal when I was in college, when I had hours of random free time to spend. But now, being self employed means that letting myself get distracted for long periods of time just ruins my ability to get anything done.
What I have done to solve this problem is to force myself onto an information diet. Even though it sounds like it might be a negative thing, its actually been pretty fantastic. Here’s how I went about it:
1) I allow myself only 30 minutes a day of reading the news.
2) I unsubscribed from a bunch of e-mail lists I was on that would send random/interesting articles to my inbox.
3) I turned off the notification beep, and the little red dot that appeared in my dock when a new e-mail came into my inbox (I use the Mail program for Mac). This way instead of interrupting whatever I was doing to go check my e-mail as soon as a new message came in, I tend to finish whatever I was engrossed in and then remember to check my e-mail. On a normal day now I’ll only check for new messages in my inbox about 4-6 times.
What these three little steps did was dramatically decrease my distractions. This lets me get what I need to get done sooner, and then I have more free time to do other things (which usually ends up being something not on the computer).
If you were like me, distracted by too much news and e-mail, I encourage you to try an information diet. And you can go even more dramatic than I did if you decide you want to…
