Everyone speaks wonders about the Low-Information Diet these days. I’m no exception – I believe that we can save a lot of time by reading less newspapers, blogs and by spending less time with email and social media.
But how? How exactly? I’ll give you a few tips about how I overcame my email and news addiction and finally built up my low information diet.
1- Block everything.
I trust the Firefox Addon ‘Blocksite’ much more than I trust myself when it comes to stopping me from visiting a website. I added every time waster to Blocksite: newspapers, email, Facebook, some blogs, etc. I even blocked Wikipedia.
And it’s not all – as it’s not too hard to disable Blocksite, I put a password to enter the menu (you can do that yourself too from the menu). My choice for password, however, was a bit special: ‘workyouidiot’ (albeit in Spanish!). All this, I can say, have contributed to me completely stopping to read the newspapers – at least not during weekdays.
2- Make Information Uncomfortable.
Blocking is enough – but what else could you do? Simple: routinely clear your browser history – just let it automatically destroy itself every time you close Firefox, Chrome or whichever browser you use. This means that you’ll have to type the full address of the websites that waste your time every time you want to access them. It takes you two, three seconds to type those names, but if you have to do it you’ll be less likely to do it than if you just had to click two times. It worked for me, it could work for you.
You can also get rid of the Gmail beeper, Facebook notify and clear the junk from your bookmarks bar. Make it hard, make it uncomfortable for you to enter those dreaded websites. Instead of checking your friend’s photos or if a plane crashed in Tanzania, get yourself to work.
3- Replace Well.
Once I first blocked the papers, I substituted them with sites that were much worse: online forums, comics, games, etc. The papers are evil – but at least you get something out of them. Forums and games are strictly unproductive.
If I wanted to read news, I made sure that I started reading more news that mattered to me – in my case: finance, business and tech (not politics, no sports). Same with social media: I started to use less personal and fun email and switched to Twitter networking for a change.
As for my Wikipedia addiction, I made sure to block the English and Spanish sites and obligate myself to read the German and Portuguese versions. Unless I’m looking for something strictly specific, the German Wiki with a million articles has pretty much everything. Even if I’m fooling around, I’ll at least be learning and practicing a foreign language.
4- Purge and Batch.
Purge the bookmarks and purge your reading list. I used to have hundreds of blogs and sites in my RSS Reader and it was a total mess. I like reading blogs and want to read new people to network, but hell – I used to spend a lot of my time doing it. It was not wise.
So I trimmed my reader to just 15 websites and nothing else. That’s all I read (more about what and who I read in the near future). It still looks like a lot, but it’s in fact little if you consider some blogs update only once a week. I’m quite proud of this type of Web Minimalism.
I made the compromise that if I wanted to add one more site to my RSS Reader, I would have to take one out – all to keep the holy 15 unchanged. So far, so good.
5- Give Yourself Prices.
Some days I spend an hour playing games, I send fifty emails and write twenty friends on Facebook. I may even spend another full hour reading Wikipedia or browsing Maps. But that’s the case only when I finished all my tasks for the day.
I write what I plan to do, and if I finish everything (or a very acceptable almost) I just let myself fool around until I go to bed. It’s not bad to relax and do the unproductive – it’s fine if you completed everything you had to do. Overwork and lack of relax will inevitably lead to stress.
Did you pursue a Low Information Diet yourself? Share your ideas and tips with me and the other readers leaving a comment!
Photo credit: mikebaird.
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