Reblog

Going Information Diet

I’ve got the idea not a long time ago. Main reasons behind the decision are:

• I have a long queue of books I bought waiting to be read and I can’t find the time to read them.
• I want to test the theory about consuming well digested and consistent information (such as books or essays) over partial and half-baked ideas (Twitter and also the majority of blog entries, plus mailing lists)
• I feel the need to consolidate many years of open loops in my profession, scratching the surface of a topic and quickly jump away to ride the wave of the next cool thing.

To be clear: I want to test in practice the assumption that partial information is also partially useful. I think there is a not negligible effort to filter out the garbage and often the ‘cool thing’ of the moment is not directly applicable to solve the issue at hand without heavy manual intervention and related context switch. I understand that this is the way you do research on new ideas and contribute back with your support. But this is just a diet and it’s supposed to end after a while :)

I don’t feel overwhelmed by current feeds, email, tweets or reading queues, especially after the recent pruning I did. But still, I can’t ignore that list of books waiting for me and the need to remove those distracting jumps I often experience from half-baked information. I also know I’m going to remove some very valuable source if I don’t follow blogs and tweets. That’s too bad, but I want to be proven wrong first.

The recipe:

• Twitter: I’ll just stop following and updating. I removed my twitter iPhone app. I’d like to update, but If I do I know I’m tempted to see replies. Direct messages are ok.
• Facebook: only personal stuff, pictures, keep in touch with old friends, no work related.
• Feeds: uninstalled NetNewsWire. I won’t read feeds anymore.
• Mailing lists: set up filter to move messages and mark as read. Unsubscribing is too long to do and by the way, what if I change my mind? :)
• Podcasts: I’ll keep them because I only listen while running. Plus, it’s digested information most of the time.
• Current reading queue/video: I’ll just save to read later some blog entries because related to my projects.
• Google: of course! Whatever is related to the task I’m doing found on Google is good to read, blogs and tweets included. But the dependency is inverted. I just don’t want to search the net for generic ‘news’.
• Mail and IM: no changes here.

As for my weekly highlights section: it won’t be updated often as before, but since I keep reading and listening around I’m pretty sure I’ll keep posting. For sure I have my thoughts on the book I’m reading. I’ll be happy to hear your reaction on this. Ah, the good old blog comments…