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| 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 1st 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.