The Information Diet Read online

  Synthesis

  The year 1999 was probably the most anticipated in nerd history: the year George Lucas returned to debut the latest movie in his Star Wars franchise—Episode I: The Phantom Menace. I was down in Albany, Georgia when it came out, my dad, my cousin Wallace, and I were all headed to see it.

  After the movie was over, Wallace and I leapt into a discussion about the movie, praising the special effects and expressing our overall annoyance at Jar Jar Binks, now one of the least-liked movie characters in cinematic history.[78] We discussed the plot line and how we thought the other two announced movies would go.

  My dad, a therapist for over 40 years by then, broke in. “I don’t understand why it had to be so violent. It seemed to me like they had a forum, and all kinds of structures in place for conflict resolution. Why did people have to keep going on attacking one another when they probably could have just sat down and talked it out?”

  Wallace and I rolled our eyes, and Wallace quipped: “It’s called Star Wars, Uncle Ray. Not Star Dialog. That’d make for a boring movie.”

  Dad was right, though. In an ideal world, we’d all strive for the great synthesis of ideas, and it’s a shame that more of us are concerned with winning an argument than we are getting the best out of one another. The problem is, Star Dialog just wouldn’t make for a particularly entertaining movie (though I have to wonder if it would have been any less entertaining than The Phantom Menace).

  The last component of data literacy is synthesis. Once we retrieve information, filter it, and publish it, we must be able to synthesize the ideas and concepts of others back into our ideas. Synthesis isn’t entertaining, and we’d all rather argue or be entertained. View publication as a chance to get feedback and a chance to make your ideas and thoughts better—an opportunity for education as much as an opportunity to educate.

  These critical thinking and data literacy concepts aren’t skills you’ll learn simply from reading the pages in a chapter of this book. It’s a skill that takes years, lots of practice, and constant refinement to develop. But just like a regular workout, these skills are good for your health—they’ll keep you living a richer, fuller life.

  Chapter 8. Attention Fitness

  Willpower

  A few years ago, I found myself completely unable to read more than a thousand words. There was no way I could read long-form journalism or even a book. The concept of reading a book, much less writing one, was completely foreign to me.

  With emails to check and reply to, I could spend the entire day trapped in a sea of distraction, having accomplished nothing. My life was littered with notifications. The little email envelope icon sitting next to the clock on my computer, the Twitter notifications, and Facebook took so much time to process that I wasn’t able to accomplish much else. My suffering was coming from a lack of will to focus.

  Some scientists certainly seem to think it’s the case that willpower is an exhaustible resource in the mind. In the book Willpower (Penguin, 2011), Roy Baumeister and John Tierney describe it as one of two consistent traits in people who have positive life outcomes—the other being intelligence.[80]

  Their book catalogues experiments in which participants who complete a task involving their will (like resisting fresh cookies) struggle to complete completely unrelated tasks (like solving a geometric puzzle) later. Resisting a candy bar may weaken your resolve in a high-pressure sales environment like buying a car.

  Willpower is part of what cognitive scientists call executive function. And executive function can be trained. Exercise is a healthy diet’s most important partner. I view attention, the conscious kind of focus that we all desire to be more productive, as a form of athleticism. Like running a marathon, our ability to focus depends as much on our will as it does our natural ability.

  If we are training our brains to shorten our attention spans and tune in to the cacophony of distractions around us, then we must certainly be able to train it to do the opposite, and strengthen it the other way around.

  Over the past few years, I’ve developed a framework for myself that has helped me increase my attention span. It’s geared towards people who spend most of their work time behind computer screens, but the theory can be applied to all kinds of careers, and it doesn’t need to be tied to work at all. It’s simply a system for measuring and lengthening your attention span. What you pay attention to is a completely different matter.

  Measurement

  If will is a trait, like intelligence, that improves our lives, and it’s an exhaustible resource, then we have to think of our attention like a currency. Our language is well-suited for this already—we don’t “burn” attention, we usually “pay” it, and often times, like the federal budget, it has deficits. Our attention is the currency that marketers lust for, and it’s about time we started guarding it, consciously, like we guard our bank accounts.

  Nothing can be increased if it first cannot be measured. In order to track your progress, the foundation of our system relies upon good, practical measurement. We need software that can measure how we’re using our computers and what we’re focused on. Fortunately enough, there’s great software for this called RescueTime, and it’s available for the Mac or the PC. You can find it by visiting RescueTime.com or by visiting the resources section of InformationDiet.com.

  RescueTime sits in the background, whenever you’re using your desktop, and tracks what you pay attention to. It’s a silent, impartial judge that watches every website you visit, and every window you have open on your desktop, and measures how productive you are.

  During your first week using RescueTime, log in to the RescueTime website frequently to fine-tune the software. You can set up lists of websites that are healthy and necessary for you to do your job and part of your ongoing set of work, and other websites that are distractions.

  Be strict with yourself: if you’ve found yourself constantly clicking the refresh button in your web-based email client, go ahead and mark email as antiproductive for you. Same goes with the news sites and blogs that you read. If you’re an overshopper, make sure RescueTime knows that Amazon.com is bad for you.

  Every week, RescueTime will send you an email giving you a productivity score, and comparing your productivity to that of the entire RescueTime community. What we want to do now is make this number go up.

  Elimination

  After you’ve set up RescueTime to measure your progress, you need to take a hard look at your computer and start eliminating the things that are distractions. You want to move yourself from a reactive model of computing, where you’re constantly being tugged and pulled in every direction and responding to every notification that comes across your screen, into a conscious model, where you’re in complete control of what you’re paying attention to.

  Take a look at your workspace, and silence everything that’s set up to notify you of anything. Silence your phone, put it on vibrate, and put it on something soft so that you can’t hear it when you’re working.

  Take a look in the “system tray” of your computer—either that spot near the bottom where your clock is on Windows, or that spot near the top on your Mac. If any of those little icons there (besides the clock) change color, create little cartoon bubbles, or otherwise generate notifications, get rid of them.

  Close down your desktop Twitter client, and shut off your instant messages. Change your Outlook preferences to only receive new messages when you click the send and receive button.

  One way to do this in modern operating systems is to create a new user account on the same computer you use, but without access to all the software that keeps you distracted. That’s how I’ve set myself up—I have one user called “Work” and another called “Play.” This gives me a container that I can put my mindless web surfing habits into, and another kept free from distraction.

  Turning these interruption technologies off isn’t enough, though. You’ll also need to arm your web browser with tools to help eliminate distractions while you’re trying t
o surf the Web. You can’t very well be expected to accomplish a Google search for valuable information when, if you’re a member of Google’s social network, Google+, there’s a bright red notification bar sitting there waiting to be clicked on.

  Fortunately, there’s a browser extension for Google Chrome and Firefox to rid you of many of the Web’s distractions. On InformationDiet.com, I’ve catalogued many of them for you—but I’m certain I’m not going to be able to keep up with the ever-expanding universe of interruption technology. So here’s a simple rule of thumb to live by: if it has a number by it, eliminate it.

  Let’s go ahead and get rid of those advertisements on the Web. Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer all have extensions that will do their best to block advertisements. Though they’re not perfect—and they’re very much an arms race against advertising-based content providers—they work well enough, and the overall reduction in exposure to advertising is probably good for your head and your bank account.

  Lastly, let’s take care of your inbox. While, yes, you probably get a lot of important email, you probably get a lot of email that’s not important too. Software can fairly easily tell the differences between these two things, and save the stuff that’s not important for consumption later on.

  Google has a tool for this in Gmail called Priority Inbox, but my personal favorite is called Sanebox.com. It works on most major email providers, and doesn’t just mark what email is important—it actually takes the email that’s not important, and dismisses it from your inbox into another folder. This way, the temptation isn’t even there. Don’t worry about missing anything. Close to the end of every working day, you’ll get an email digest of all the emails Sanebox put into your “Later” folder so that you can go back and check to see what you missed.

  I remember when I did this for myself the first time. The only thing I can liken it to is the first time I put on a pair of prescription eyeglasses. I didn’t know my eyes and brain were straining to see things, but once the glasses were on, I could feel half the muscles in my face relax. It was a wondrous moment. It felt clean.

  Sadly, it doesn’t last long. After about five minutes, curiosity will kick in, and you’ll start wondering what’s going on in the world. You might start to panic. “What if there’s an important email, or even a not so important but very banal and uninteresting email that’s waiting for you in your inbox?” your inner voice might say.

  Let this inner voice yammer all it wants, and treat it as though a crazy person has been locked inside your head. After a few days of working with Sanebox, I found myself questioning my very own significance: I was getting so much less email that I began to assume people didn’t like me anymore. I found myself trawling through my Sanebox unimportant emails hoping that I’d missed some important email. My ego was wounded based on the sheer reduction in volume of email.

  Now perhaps your ego isn’t as fragile as mine, but I think that’s the same voice that tells coke addicts to do more coke, and smokers to smoke more cigarettes. It’s at best the voice of compulsion and at worst the voice of addiction. You’re going to have to stop listening to it. It’s going to take hard work, and a lot of strength, but you can do it. You just have to be pragmatic about it and take it slow.

  Training

  Watching the juggler jog backwards past me on the 16th mile, or the man towing his fully grown but clearly incapacitated son behind him on the 24th, was enough for me to understand that I probably wasn’t going to ever be a world-class athlete. Though my wife looks like Indiana Jones trying to escape the giant boulder of “Clay”[81] behind her in our finish line photo, I’m still happy to have accomplished the feat.

  I recommend that everyone in the world train for at least one marathon in their lives: it’s a testament to what your body can do if you train appropriately. It’s also a reminder that training takes a long time—training for that 26.2-mile race took six months—and a lot of small, slow steps to get there. For those of us that aren’t world-class runners, marathon training is, above all else, a test of will.

  To train for my first marathon, I used Jeff Galloway’s “run-walk” method: it meant running for a certain length of time, then taking a shorter walk break. Over time, the goal is to lengthen the running time, and shorten the break time.

  This method works for running for a few reasons. It allows you to go at your own pace and acknowledges that some people don’t train for marathons in order to win them, but rather to complete them. It allows you to expend your energy based on your level of exertion, rather than on distance. Finally, it creates a framework that is growable and tunable to you as you grow.

  We’re going to use a similar method for strengthening your attention span. In order to do it, you’re first going to need a good timer. You can buy a runner’s stopwatch that has an interval timer if you want, or—if you want to be less annoying at work—you can download some software to do it on your desktop. Any old desktop timer will work, but interval timers work best. This will be the one notification you’re allowed to have.

  Before you really get started with this technique, I want you to promise to be forgiving with yourself. Failure at this doesn’t mean you’re a bad person, or that somehow you’re not competent—it probably just means you bit off more than you could chew. Take it slow and find a pace for you. The thing that got my 240-pound self (after dropping 40 pounds during training) across a marathon finish line was this thought:

  “I’m not going to win this marathon. My goal is to not come in last.”

  Now, we’re going to start off slow. Try working in five minute intervals, with a one minute break in which you can do anything—check Facebook, deal with Twitter, or check your phone for text messages—anything you want, except check your email (we’ll get to that in a minute). In one hour, try working like this five times, then pause your timer. Get up and stretch or use the restroom for one to two minutes. Remember, sitting kills you.

  Once back at your desk, do another three repetitions of the cycle. By this time, you should have about 10 more minutes left in your hour. Check your email, and respond to the things that you need to respond to.

  Now sometimes this won’t work for you—you may want to pay more attention for longer spurts of time. That’s fine; this is a framework, not a set of laws. These rules needn’t apply all the time. But I will caution you—you’re training for endurance, not short bursts of speed. Usain Bolt might be the fastest man in the world at the 100-yard dash, but it’s unlikely that will do him much good in a marathon.

  It’s likely your mind will beg for you to work on a problem for longer than five minutes. In some cases it might be right, but stick with the program if you can. Even experienced marathon runners often run less distance than they can, so that they can train up for speed and better endurance; similarly, we’re starting off at five minutes to make it easy on you—you need to get used to this pattern of working more than anything else.

  So if you’re working on complex problems, and feel that you must work longer than five-minute intervals, initially, then do it. But for a few hours, or even a solid day, give the 5:1 setting a shot. You might find that you get more minutes out of your day in the long term that way. Remember, we’re starting off easy so that you don’t get discouraged.

  After you’ve got the 5:1 thing down, it’s time to start increasing your attention span. In your first week, gradually turn up the number of work minutes in 15-second intervals. By day four, try to get up to about seven minutes. Remember to split your intervals up—in any given 60-minute set, you’re going to need at least 2 minutes to stretch and about 10 minutes to deal with email.

  As not all numbers divide into 48 evenly, these stretch moments and email moments are going to need pliable time limits. Do what you think is best, but if you have to err, err to the side of rest, not to the side of work.

  By day 10, try for a 10-minute work interval to a 2-minute rest interval. A 10:2 interval may seem vastly inferior to a 9:1 interv
al. It’s more than 60% less efficient to spend two minutes resting for every minute working as it is one for every nine. But remember, what we’re trying to do here is to lengthen your attention span. At 10 minutes, we begin to get to the usual standard of our attention span length.

  Continue growing your work time as you see fit, at increments that are shorter than noticeable. Do only 15- to 30-second increases, never more than once a day, and try not to go longer than 15 minutes without a small stretch break, at least. Remember: we’re building a healthy lifestyle for you.

  For this book, I worked in 15-minute work intervals with 2-minute breaks three times an hour, and a 9-minute email check at the end of every hour. I stretched, used the restroom, or otherwise didn’t look at the screen for the full two minutes, I found this helped my mind reflect and decompress, so that I could get back to writing. Sometimes those two-minute breaks turned into five-minute breaks; sometimes those 15-minute work spans turned into 20-minute ones—I’m not a stickler for time anymore.

  I also did only four hours in a row of this focused task work at a time, followed by at least an hour break that was entirely away from the computer screen. I tried to schedule my day so that I accomplished all the task-oriented computer work I needed to accomplish by noon, then I could take an hour for lunch. If I had meetings in any given day, they were scheduled for after lunch and if at all possible, back-to-back and directly after lunch. If my schedule allowed, then I was back at it after the meetings were over.