Start following information diet to regain mental clarity

Pearl by Pawel Kuczynski

Do you feel constant urge to check your mobile and social media?

Do you spend most of your time staring at screen?

Do you often forget what you have heard few seconds ago or what you need to do?

Do you feel as if your peers are doing great things and achieving their goals while you are stuck in the same place?

Are you failing at focusing at task at hand and not reaching your life goals?

If you are answering yes to above written questions then I suspect you are not following information diet and consuming more content than you can process. Too much information and constant use of information technologies will have a negative impact on your mental health and your life in general. You start wasting huge amount of precious time on useless things, fail to finish your tasks for the day and be stuck in the same place (career position, financial condition, and professional level) for many years.

I was very bad at following information diet for many years. Several years ago, I even did not know that I have such a problem. It seemed to me that diving into Internet and spending time in social media for several hours a day is a normal thing and assumed that many friends of mine do this. Furthermore this was and still is such a fun thing to do. However, by passage of time, it became clear that I need to limit my time and care more about what I am directing and spending my attention in daily basis. Then I learned about information diet and started following it. In last few years, I made good progress at cutting out most of information that do not make any useful contribution to my life. During this period I came up with few ideas that made good changes in my life. I want to share them with you here. Most of these ideas are not new or innovative, I learned them from Internet, and you also can search, learn and follow information diet, here is the link. So let’s start.

Information diet

Practice info diet – ignore all irrelevant, time consuming and unactionable information. Most of things you learn do not make any contribution to your life at all, why you spend time on them? Start cutting out such useless information from your life.

Maintain peaceful environment. Spend more time in quiet and peaceful environment. Eliminate all noise. Set distraction free mode in all devices and information channels so they do not beep or give some noise to pull your attention.

Limit news, social media TV, music, and movies. News and social media feeds are the most useless and junk information you inject to your brain. Limit time you spend in front of TV and watch only few movies in one week. Limit time you spend on social media (mine is 30 - 50 minutes per day, want to limit even more) and do not check email 1^st thing in the morning.

Make search list in advance & avoid netsurfing (jumping into rabbit hole of hyperlinks). Start forming a habit of making search list to search later or cut out social media while you are working on your device so you can focus on your task and finish it.

Select fun stuff wisely & limit its number. Choose few best movies, books or TV shows from available options, less is more. I try to be selective at reading books and watch up to 2 movies a week not more.

Socialize with your community. Spend more time with friends and do not use mobile phone while having fun with your friends.

Information channels

TV set. Choose few important channels and unsubscribe from the rest.

Radio and music. Select few radio channels and music lists and delete the rest.

Mobile phone. Set your mobile on distraction free mode. Turn off all notifications except few important ones. Delete everything useless in inbox, sent & draft messages, contacts, pictures, audios, videos, apps and other files.

Emails. Maintain empty email. Delete useless information from inbox, sent, archive, contact lists and other folders. Avoid posting and sharing your email in public web pages. Set spam filters.

Browsers. Sort out and delete old tabs. Uninstall useless and annoying apps, widgets, gadgets, and add-ons. Install apps that block ads and other distractions. Update browsers.

Social networks. Update all your profiles. Follow few important friends, influencers, groups and block the rest. Turn off email notifications. Modify privacy settings to limit distractions. Deactivate useless accounts.

Blog and news websites. Choose few important blogs and unsubscribe from the rest of information sources.

Podcasts. Unsubscribe from all podcasts you do not listen and keep only 2-3 of them that you listen on regular basis.

Computer. Set simple theme on desktop. Select and backup essential materials and delete the rest. Go through documents, pictures, audios, videos, software and other files. Update essential programs, firewall and antivirus.

So far these are the ideas and practices I learned and following till this day. They were very useful to me and I made pretty good changes in my habits and life. I hope this information will be useful to you and you also will be more conscious about information you are consuming in daily basis.