Reblog

Back From The Diet

The Good

• Cutting the long tail: the diet had the interesting side effect of cutting the long tail of information. The long segment of the tail includes very specific and localized news: the more specific the information the less subscribers following that source. The diet moved the “interestingness trigger” higher in the curve by eliminating too detailed source of information. Only the fittest news will survive the long tail and move up (the fit function here is the general consensus that the news requires attention). Since there is a not-negligible traveling time for the news to move up, with the diet I’m trading freshness of information for quality by being not informed as soon as the information is created.
• Push vs Pull: the diet eliminates all sources of “push” type of information. If something is sent to you and collected inside an inbox that’s what I call “push”. It can be counter-intuitive: you might think that if there is a subscription then the model is “pull”. True, but the inversion happens when I start polling the subscription to see if there are new items transforming the good push into the evil pull. The bad of course is if you check constantly.
• Presence amplification: I don’t remember where I read it, but for each email sent a few more will be sent back to you. It’s not different for other kind of web presences: Twitter, Facebook and a whole bunch of other services offer you the possibility to say something. Don’t get me wrong, that’s great, but when too many feedbacks accumulate you need to allocate time to digest the list.

The Bad

• Missing relevant news: of course this is the main reason to stay in the loop. Aggregators like InfoQ (and many others) are at the top of the long tail of information and produce more digested information (for example by summarizing interesting posts from mailing lists) than Twitter for example. But I still missed some relevant information (to me) that didn’t make it to the general aggregator. Expected: this is the trade-off I was talking about.
• In the loop: another important aspect of micro-blogging is the way it reports about other people doing stuff. Staying in the loop boosts motivation because it re-creates a working environment where other people are doing what you’re doing. Twitter is much more powerful in this context than blogs or x-casts. This is especially true if you work alone from home without a physical team.
• More time available? If you remember one of the reason I started the diet was to spend more time reading books. I thought the time not spent reading online could easily be replaced by books. It only partially happened. I need at least the time to read a chapter at once because for smaller fragments I easily get lost trying to remember what that sentence was about. So yes, more time available but in very short segments not suitable for reading a book. For this specific problem I prefer to allocate a couple of hours here and there.

So I enjoyed in the last two months the possibility to make a comparison between too much and fragmented information and no information at all, or close to that. Trevor was right! :) I need to reduce information consumption or stay away for a while when I’m wasting too much energy. In the last 2 months I learned how to trim information to the essential and how to live without it. Now I can gradually increase the flow back and enjoy staying in the loop. This is especially true these days working alone on projects: the presence of a virtual office with virtual colleagues helps me stay in focus and solve problems. Let’s see.