My road to mobile freedom – the ability to travel wherever and whenever I wish – has sparked a number of other initiatives for me. The main one: living simpler and being happier with less. Less clutter, less clothing, less car … less “stuff”. And I’m not talking only about years of accumulating worthless physical things, but mental as well. Consumer and information overload.
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The other day, a colleague of mine mentioned that he has a forty-five minute roundtrip commute everyday. Twenty minutes or so each way to/from work. He said he realized how it was such a big waste of time and that he’d decided to start listening to books on tape, podcasts, language learning courses, etc.
As part of Generation:Web, I can safely say that I consume too much information. Way too much information. And finding time, as my misguided coworker suggests, to cram more data into an increasingly small and precious amount of daily “quiet time” is definitely not atop my to-do list.
Not a day goes by that I’m not multitasking with two or more information inputs at a time: work e-mail, cell phone, iPod, RSS feeds, the newspaper, television, instant messaging, talking to co-workers, my boss intercomming me, internet radio, hearing conversations outside my office, personal e-mail, other personal e-mail, and on and on and on and on. No doubt many of you are doing the same.
Stop it.
Really.
It’s information overload and chances are that you’re not retaining a large portion of it. Quick: can you name three articles or blog posts you read yesterday? How about this morning? I can’t.
Tim Ferriss’ The 4-Hour Work Week suggests putting yourself on an “information diet”. The gist of it is to cut out all unnecessary informational sources almost entirely for one week. And see how it (doesn’t) affect/s your life.
I took this challenge of sorts. But I took it one step further: I coupled it with an idea I’d heard about finding time every day, if possible, to sit in complete silence. Whether it’s turning your car radio off on the way home from work; standing silently in the shower with your eyes closed, focused on nothing; or sitting on the couch by yourself and quietly staring off into space. The key is to do this for at least thirty minutes every day.
I’m ramping up several online ventures to try before I leave for my trip. The goal is to put them on auto-pilot and completely remove me from the equation. Lately, it’s been difficult to develop good ideas for moving them towards sustained profitability. So I started giving myself the “silent treatment” a few weeks ago. I drive with the radio off now and sit quietly, blissfully with my own thoughts.
In just a short time, I’ve already had a few Eureka moments to resolve issues that I previously could not work through. Afterwards, I often think to myself, “How’d I not think of that before?”.
Because I couldn’t. On a bulemic’s information diet, I simply didn’t have the brain cycles to think about any more.
Life isn’t a race to see how much stuff – physical and mental – you can consume. Chances are there are a good many things your daily routine could do without.
Five simple things that I can recommend:
- Unsubscribe from all magazines and newspapers. Every one of them. They’re a waste of paper and money (that whopping $10 annual subscription could get you a couple more nights travel in India). Plus, they’re essentially articles wrapped in fancy advertisements – taunting to you to buy more. If you really miss them, you can read many online for free anyway.
- Unsubscribe to 25% of your RSS feeds. If I find a decent blog or news site, I’ll subscribe to the RSS feed. If the site doesn’t release anything valuable within the first two weeks, it goes into a “pending delete” folder in my feed reader. A week later, if I’m still not seeing anything I like, I delete it. If you’re breaking out in hives like a crack addict a week later because you just have to read The Daily Puppy, you can always resubscribe. My guess: you won’t think twice about those deleted time-wasters again.
- Check your e-mail once per day. And commit to it. My employer sets up employee e-mail clients to check for e-mail every two minutes. And I did the same thing at first with my personal Yahoo mail account. I fast became a slave to the e-mail notification/reply cycle ten times an hour. This is a huge productivity killer and a great way to overtax your attention span and stress level.
- Stop watching TV. How many hours daily do you feed into the big glowing box? Two? Three? If you’re watching three hours of TV per day (the average American watches over four and a half hours every single day!), that’s almost an entire day of your life every week up in smoke. And what have you gotten in return? Think what you’d do with another whole day tacked on to the end of every week. Still not convinced? Check out TrashYourTV.com.
- Buy Tim Ferriss’ The 4-Hour Work Week. If you’re an entrepreneur, a traveler, or both, you really need to read this book. There is quite literally something in it for everyone. It’s the self-help book for people who hate self-help books (like me). I can almost guarantee, at the very least, you’ll take one thing away from it that’ll change your life in a positive way.
In my experience, these are mostly minor changes that require little to no investment on your part. Except cutting back severely on my TV habits (I’ve been a lifelong addict), none of these required any significant, life-altering adjustments.
But the return on investment is huge. With just these five steps in place, the average person could easily find an additional 4-6 hours or more of free time every single day. Try them. It’s a lot easier than you might think to be happier with less information “clutter” in your life.