The Information Diet Read online

  It’s worth noting that I’ve started to apply this same technique to other things that require my concentration. Reading on the iPad, for instance, is tough for me because my email is just a tap or two away. In order to make a successful journey through a book, even for leisure, I’ve got to apply the same technique. The technique is about focus and concentration, not necessarily about getting work done.

  The other good thing about this method is that it forces us to consciously measure the time we spend working on a computer. By building in the interval metronome, we become keenly aware of how much time has gone by, and how much time we have left to get done what we need to get done. No longer will you look up and wonder where the day went. You’ve used your executive function and accounted for it.

  Finally, remember that you’re measuring your success. We set up RescueTime for a reason: to make sure that what you were doing works for you. Make sure, after a week or two of doing this, that your productivity number is headed in the right direction, and that it stays that way.

  All our brains and minds are unique, and though this works for me, it may not work for you. If it’s the case that this system isn’t working for you, then it’s an opportunity for creativity. I encourage you to invent your own system for training out your attention span—and share it with us on InformationDiet.com.

  Distractibility Can Be Good

  It turns out that constant focus isn’t all that great, and that allowing a bit of distractibility into our lifestyles can have some benefit. Several academic studies now show that surfing the Web mindlessly, for brief periods of time, can have restorative cognitive properties[82]—much more so than things with a high cognitive load like managing email. Focus on building your attention span, but don’t forget to give yourself some breaks. Just make sure they’re set to certain limits. Spending all day focused entirely on your work is bound to be exhausting.

  Chapter 9. A Healthy Sense of Humor

  “A merry heart doeth good like a medicine, but a broken spirit drieth the bones.”

  —Proverbs 17:22

  We could all stand to be a little more like Karl Rove in Washington. I met him once at a politics and technology event here in Washington, D.C. He glanced down at my attendee badge, saw the company name on it, and exclaimed: “Blue State Digital! You guys do great things for the wrong people!”

  I responded: “Another half-truth from Karl Rove.”

  He laughed, told me how he would have beaten Howard Dean in 2004, and asked for my business card.

  Three days later, I walked into my office to find a handwritten letter with a lot of strange stamps on it. It was a letter from my cocktail companion and renowned philatelist. The letter said:

  “Dear Mr. Johnson,

  It was a pleasure meeting you at the Yahoo! Citizens 2.0 Conference. Best of luck with the business, but only up to a point!

  If you’d like to have the picture you took of me inscribed, please send it over and I’ll sign it for you and send it back. If not, please accept this letter as a souvenir. Now you can show your liberal friends that you met the great Satan himself.

  Sincerely,

  Karl Rove”

  Over the course of a few weeks, I found myself developing a pen pal in Rove. He and I exchanged a few letters—he romanticized “pushing atoms back and forth”—and I thanked him for helping us raise all that money for MoveOn.org. (Though I must admit, my interface with the United States Postal Service isn’t what it ought to be.) It struck me that Rove, arguably one of the most successful political architects in history, was not only funny, but he was also keenly aware and capable of poking fun at himself.

  Left-of-center people may find this atrocious. Here’s a man who helped architect George W. Bush’s political strategy for eight years. Known as “Bush’s Brain,” he’s often thought of by millions of people as one of the most evil spinmasters that ever existed—alongside Dick Cheney, and Bush himself, Rove is thought of by the left as the puppeteer behind the administration that led us through the Iraq war, the botched Katrina efforts, the housing bubble, and the banking system’s meltdown.

  And here he was, in a courteous and handwritten note, being hilarious though downright glib about the whole thing. In Rove’s defense—he wasn’t making fun of those things that the left has him tied up in. He was making fun of himself.

  Rove has a sense of humor because he has to, and he probably understands the same thing I’ve learned in the past few years of working on issues that I deeply care about and things that appear, to me at least, to be vital to our condition.

  Chances are, if we can’t laugh at something, we can’t think rationally about it. (The exception to this rule is sports. Sports is about clear wins and losses, and most importantly, entertainment. It’s okay to polarize sports—it’s not any fun if you don’t. The last thing we want to do is think rationally about sports. The stuff that matters, though, is about our livelihoods and the future of our country.)

  Laughter is important to a healthy information diet because it has all kinds of incredible health benefits. It turns out laughter increases our heart rate in a good way, increases our cardiovascular health, and burns calories. Some science shows that laughter may cause increased blood flow to the brain and decrease stress (thus boosting our immune systems), may normalize blood sugar levels, and may help us sleep better.

  The first way a sense of humor helps is that it makes the truth more palatable. It bypasses our gut reaction for fight and flight, and makes it comfortable to hear what’s going on in a more digestible fashion. Shows like the Daily Show and the Colbert Report help us to find humor in the daily news, but they also tend to feed us small nuggets of truth wrapped in delicious, bacon-like hilariousness. Sometimes, it’s a healthy way of getting some national news exposure without having to take stuff too seriously.

  But watching the Daily Show isn’t going to give you a sense of humor, and relying on it solely for your national news information diet is likely to leave you with a point of view that’s just as misinformed as watching FOX or MSNBC. Jon Stewart himself will tell you: his job is to entertain you, not to inform you or even tell you the truth. The difference between Jon Stewart and Bill O’Reilly is that Stewart is honest about his role as entertainer.

  While these shows are funny, watching them isn’t the same as having a sense of humor. We shouldn’t conflate laughter with having a sense of humor. Laughing is important, sure, but being able to see the humor in all things—especially yourself—is even more important.

  It turns out that a sense of humor might just be a vital part of our brain’s ability to rewire itself.

  Much of what makes us laugh are things that are unexpected. The great jokes are about misdirection and surprise. As we anticipate the punchline of a joke, we’re trying to figure out where it’s going—the joke itself tends to be a buildup towards an expectation, and then comes the punchline: usually something unexpected. That’s what makes it funny.

  Take Rove’s letter: he leads with something rather standard—a greeting and formality, but then closes with a killer punchline. It immediately changed my opinion of Rove, unwiring the heuristic in my brain that’s been trained by years of being a democratic political operative to believe that the man is pure, unbridled evil.

  Instantly, upon reading that letter, Rove became to me somebody that’s human and very aware of himself. My presumptions about him changed and all of a sudden, I found myself saying in my social circles, “Oh, Karl Rove isn’t so bad. He just has different beliefs than we do.” I’d get jumped on, then pull out the letter and show it off. The power of Karl Rove’s humor softened the hearts of even the most liberal of activists.

  It turns out that there may be some science behind this idea. In their book Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind (MIT Press), scientists Matthew M. Hurley, Daniel C. Dennett, and Reginald B. Adams Jr. provide a cognitive and evolutionary perspective for our sense of humor.

  They argue that humor could be
a cognitive cleanup mechanism of the mind, that nature needed a way for us to constantly check our judgmental heuristics, and reward ourselves for seeking the unexpected. They stipulate that laughter itself is a social signal that demonstrates cognitive prowess—something that’s useful in mate selection—and thus, our ability to laugh spread through generations.

  Humor tends to be a useful mechanism for figuring out when you’re overly attached to information, too. If you can’t laugh at something, it likely means you’re not flexible with the information—that you take it so seriously that your mind cannot be changed. While it’s good to have these stances on some topics (say, the Holocaust or slavery), if you can’t laugh at Lebron James jokes, you might be taking your love of the Miami Heat a little too seriously.

  Studying humor tends to make whatever might be funny no longer so, so I’ll leave it at this: lighten up.

  Chapter 10. How to Consume

  “While it is true that many people simply can’t afford to pay more for food, either in money or time or both, many more of us can. After all, just in the last decade or two we’ve somehow found the time in the day to spend several hours on the Internet and the money in the budget not only to pay for broadband service, but to cover a second phone bill and a new monthly bill for television, formerly free. For the majority of Americans, spending more for better food is less a matter of ability than priority.”

  —Michael Pollen

  Consume Consciously

  Let’s first define the kind of information consumption that matters for our discussion. When I say consumption, I mean the kind of consumption that requires action on your part to initiate, with something whose purpose it is purely to provide you with information. Watching television, surfing the Web, listening to the radio, playing video games, and reading books, magazines, or newspapers—these are all forms of active information consumption. If it has a channel, a page, a frequency—if it involves you turning it on and off, or you picking it up—that’s the kind of information we’re talking about.

  We’re not talking about the information consumption you don’t have explicit control over beginning and ending: advertisements on the side of the road during your commute to work, conversations with friends, families, and the waiter at your local restaurant, or the music in an elevator. While these things do contribute to your overall information intake, you don’t have a lot of control over them, so we can’t do much about them without turning you into a recluse.

  We’re also not talking about the production of information for others to consume. While this is part of data literacy as we discussed earlier, writing, outlining, and even editing shouldn’t count towards our total information consumption.

  Keeping It Clean

  You’d never be successful on a food diet if your freezer was filled with ice cream, your refrigerator was filled with fried chicken, and your cabinets were filled with macaroni and cheese. So first let’s clean out our metaphorical information refrigerator.

  I advocate canceling your cable or satellite television subscription if you have one, and getting your video entertainment from services like YouTube, Hulu, and Netflix. With the exception of weather information, most news services carried by television networks don’t do the public any service. Having cable (or satellite TV) in your home while being on an information diet is like trying to go on a food diet with a magical sink that pours not only hot and cold water, but also delicious milkshakes. While you may have the will to resist it, let’s do what we can to increase our chances of success.

  This move is also economical. A basic cable package, on the lowest end, costs consumers an average of $52 a month or $624 per year. Add in premium stations and advanced packages, and you’ll see your cable television bill approach upwards of $100 a month or $1200 a year.

  With a reasonable broadband connection, even if you purchase individual episodes of television at $2 an episode from a service like iTunes, you end up with a net annual savings, and many other benefits, including not having to watch advertisements, resulting in saved time. You’ll also remove the temptation to couch surf and mindlessly watch any show being provided to you.

  But besides saving you money, cutting cable is going to start changing your relationship with information—and shift you from being a reactive consumer to a conscious one. If every piece of information you consume on your couch comes with a cost, or at least involves more conscious selection than flipping through the long list of what’s available on cable at a given time, you’ll have more control over what you’re consuming.

  Tim Ferriss, in his book The 4-Hour Work Week (Crown Archetype ), advocates for an information diet that he calls selective ignorance. It first involves fasting: not checking email, not dealing with social networks, and avoiding much of the “incoming” information you have for a solid period of time. During this time, one allows only a deliberate intake of one hour of non-news information on television, and one hour of fiction reading per day. Then you wean yourself back onto an information diet of only information that’s actionable and relevant.

  For most, I think this will yield an unsuccessful outcome. By the end of the fast, you’ll be so eager to plug back in that—like a food fast—you’re likely to binge as soon as you get the chance. The selective ignorance plan also encourages us to eliminate diversity in our information diets, rather than exposing us to a diversity of knowledge, information, and opinion that may come our way.

  I prefer a data-driven and more pragmatic approach. When you start a food diet, the most sensible way to figure things out is to first audit the calories you’re taking in, to see if you’re overconsuming. An honest food journal can help you keep your food intake under control.

  We should try the same approach with information. We need a framework for figuring out how much information we’re consuming if we’re to consume more of the good stuff and less of the bad stuff. There are three ways we can measure our information intake: by the number of words we hear and read every day, by the amount of overall bytes we consume (like we measure computer intake), and by hours—the amount of time we spend deliberately consuming information. There will always be more bytes and more words, but time is non-renewable, so let’s use this as our method of measurement.

  Take a liberal count of the hours you spend in front of a computer consuming information for one week. You can do this in two ways: by keeping a journal and spending two minutes at the top of each hour estimating how much of your time you spent consuming—or automatically, by using a time-auditing tool like RescueTime, and then estimating the amount of noncomputer time you spend afterwards.

  Since we’re using time as our measurement, it makes sense to use scheduling as our form of information intake. If we stick to a schedule, we’re exercising control over it, rather than allowing it to control us. It will also help us to respect our information-intake time. By allowing ourselves only a finite amount of time in which to consume information, we can consume more deliberately.

  I recommend trying to slowly adjust to an information consumption time of no more than six hours per day. For some of us—the knowledge worker especially—this sounds impossible. But look at it this way: the professional’s job is to produce, and if you’re spending less than half of your work day on the production of information, you’re likely not being as productive as you could be.

  A sample information intake schedule may look something like this:

  7 a.m.–8 a.m.: Information consumption time. Read the newspaper, watch morning television, check the weather, check social media feeds, etc.

  11:30 a.m.–12:30 p.m.: Email

  4:30 p.m.–5:30 p.m.: Email

  8 p.m.–10 p.m.: Entertainment time. Watch television, check social media feeds, etc.

  10 p.m.–11 p.m.: Fiction reading

  For the person with Gmail or Outlook living permanently on her desktop, Twitter scrolling by in the background, and Skype and Google Talk running in the background, even the idea of this schedule may cause heart pal
pitations. It’s a strict, low information schedule involving only two hours of email, four hours for entertainment, and zero hours for education or research.

  This schedule is a framework of what your information diet could look like, but it’s not written in stone. Some days, when you need to do a lot of research or you feel the urge to learn something new, you might move things around and consume less entertainment or less email than you would on another day. Some days, your information diet will just require you to consume more information than others.

  The important part isn’t what you spend your time on or when you spend it. The important part is that you create a flexible schedule for yourself and stick to it.

  For the average person, who currently consumes more than 11 hours of information a day, I do not recommend jumping straight into the six-hour information diet. Instead, try to wean yourself slowly. Give yourself achievable goals. Audit the time you’re presently spending consuming, and start reducing it by 30 minutes every week until you get to a time that’s right for you, your goals, and your job.

  For many, this will result in a net increase in our most non-renewable resource: time. A six-hour consumption day is truly terrifying for some, not because they’re afraid of no longer being connected, but because they won’t know what to do with the extra time. If you’re cutting five hours off your information intake time, you’re going to need to divert your attention to something else during those remaining hours.

  Try to fill some of those reclaimed hours producing, rather than consuming, information. Try writing in a paper journal, writing articles for a blog, taking up photography, or creating funny videos of kittens for the YouTube audience, if you must. As we discussed in Chapter 7, Data Literacy, the production of information sharpens the mind and clarifies your thought.