“Once you realize that you can turn off the noise without the world ending, you’re liberated in a way that few people ever know.” Timothy Ferriss
I was spending some time the other night catching up on some internet reading using the excellent Instapaper iPhone Application (you don’t need an iPhone to use Instapaper, I started using it in it’s web-based form well before I got my iPhone). I found one article I had saved which was an interview with an author of an upcoming book. I did not recognise either the name of the book or the author and after a quick skim over the contents of the article and I could see no reason why I had saved the article. I do save a lot of information to process later and extract anything that I think is relevant.
I tell this brief story as I am trying to overcome a personal habit of consuming too much information. I have hundreds of blog posts to read, stacks of books and magazines and a fast internet connection at both home and work which means I am only seconds away from finding the answers to any question that may pop in to my head. What the above example showed me it is OK not to consume all of the information, and if something is interesting and relevant it is very likely that it will present itself to you again in the future.
I am making a real effort to cut down on my information consumption and this will certainly help. Why am I cutting down you may ask? Well, I feel that I have reached saturation point on a lot of the topics I usually read about, so I want to focus my time more effectively on my Lifestyle Project (namely the quitting the 9-5 bit), and I think that a better use of my time at the moment is to do more writing than reading. Reading is important to inspire your writing but I think that I have gotten a little out of balance, spending most of my time consuming information and not much time producing content, which is a pretty important part of being a blogger. There is nothing wrong with this, it is just my balance is so out of whack it is not the most effective for improving my writing and my longer term goals as a blogger.
So I am training myself (slowly) to only consume the information needed to do the task at hand, and make taking action for my own projects the real priority. Therefore please forgive me if I miss the odd post or commenting on your blog, I am keeping an eye on things and increasingly it seems I garner a lot of information from twitter. Twitter is like a river that you dip in to from time to time but can’t catch everything that flows through it – I like this approach and it seems to be working well! I am a big fan of simplicity so am on a real simplicity binge at the moment trying to simplify a lot of the elements that take up my time and attention.
It’s about selective ignorance and the art letting bad things happen. What’s really the worst that could happen anyway?
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- Hope you are enjoyed the festive period and are well on the way with your Lifestyle Projects in the New Year!
- This post should (for RSS and EMail subscribers only) contain secret password to the Muji Choronotebook competition – so I hope it works! [NB: The plugin did not work! I’ll have to post a subscriber only link again somehow – sorry!)
- If you have any requests for topics you would like me to cover on my blog please do let me know.
