Ben Hughes

31 Dec 2011

Updated Info-Diet Rules

I’ve decided that I either need to quit Twitter fully, or re-engage with it in a different way. For the next week or two I’m going to try out out the following rules, then take it from there:

filter out tweets with URLs
not use it during family time
not use it during work pomodoros (a given)
turn notifications off

Filtering out URLs is a very heavy-handed way to reduce the amount of news I see. This means I’ve had to switch Twitter clients to ones that allow filtering, namely the TweetDeck Chrome app and Twicca for Android.

I’ll also try a combination of lists to further filter out news.

I’m aiming to see if:

it’s viable to avoid news
Twitter is still fun an interesting without news
I can maintain the presence, engagement and clarity I’ve been feeling lately

30 Dec 2011

Another week in the wilderness

Week two of my slow-info diet is done, and I’m currently gorging myself on news. Last week I wondered how much of my experience was down to lack of sleep, and how much was genuine.

Without news, I’m getting massively more reading done. In the last week I’ve read about 35% of A Dance With Dragons, along with a few chapters of The New Capitalist Manifesto.

I feel calmer, more peaceful and more patient. I’m losing tht feeling that there’s so much I’m missing out on, so much I need to learn.

This week I feel less disenfranchised with Twitter, so I’m putting a lot of that down to poor sleep. But I still don’t know quite what to do with it, as a medium. Most of the people I follow on Twitter post a lot of interesting news-y articles, and most discussion I have is around that. I still intend to keep my news consumption down to one day a week, so what, if any, place does Twitter have? I’m still not sure.

I don’t think appearing once a week is viable. It feels disingenuous. So I think it’s either quit fully or go back to regular/daily usage.

If I do go back I’m going to impose some usage rules around what and how much I share. For the most part I’ve stopped continually observing my life, so I’m more present and engaged. It’s a really nice feeling that I don’t want to lose.

Overall, I’m still very much liking this diet. While in part it’s “ignorance is bliss”, I’d like to think I’m becoming ignorant of things that don’t truly matter while slowly becoming less ignorant of those that do.

24 Dec 2011

First Week In The Wilderness

Yesterday was the first ‘go nuts’ day in my slow info diet, which means I had been without Twitter and news for a week. Here are my brief observations, which may or may not be coloured by only having 3hrs sleep the night before.

I had to force myself back into info-sugar consumption, much more so than with real sugar in my slow carb diet. I just wasn’t very interested. It took effort to constantly check Twitter and to read Zite and Read It Later.

I found it a lot harder to be present with the kids. I had more trouble keeping my cool. 3hrs sleep and a pregant wife in hospital would have also been contributing here, but the info-sugar seemed to be making it significantly worse.

I didn’t want to share as much on Twitter. I found myself without anything to say, which is, well, atypical. Even stranger, I felt much less connection to the people I follow. It also didn’t seem like anyone had particularly missed me. Again, that could be the lack of sleep talking.

Over all I felt frustrated and, paradoxically, disconnected. I missed the peace of the previous week.

I did learn about some cool stuff, and to a degree caught up with people’s lives. Read It Later and particularly Zite were even more useful than with my previous info consumption habits. If trunk.ly was still around it would have been remarkably handy. I got to watch Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and Navy SEALs, so it wasn’t all bad ;–)

I am looking forward to a week without news, so in that respect the diet is working exactly as-designed.