The Information Fasting Diet

More news and information has been published this century than all of last century. How do I cope with the amount of content and the richness of information available to me? How do I make enough time?

I don’t. My reasoning is this: there is so much content because of the speed and breadth of production. Both of these things reduce the quality of information produced. Therefore most of what we read/see is like highly processed junk food – uniform ingredients in the form of clichés, celebrities, crimes and caricatures, assembled in slightly different ways (talking heads vs screaming headlines).

I have not watched television news for the best part of 25 years, ever since I got to see what they did to events and stories that I knew something about. I do not read the newspaper, I scan the headlines on my iPad. This allows me to look at stories that I think I might find interesting rather than simply because they are on the page in front of me and getting to the next page requires effort. I also do not regard anything I read in the newspaper as being true. I always try to imagine what the more accurate version looks like as I read – what have they left out, what have they misinterpreted, how are they stacking their language to manipulate me?

I read long articles of interest to me courtesy of a wonderful site called The Browser. This contains intelligent, eclectic writing on all sorts of subjects from around the world, but it is a pleasure rather than a duty – in other words it is a leisure activity. They produce a daily digest of 8 or 9 great stories, and I click the links if they appeal.

I have selected a few feeds which I read every day because they relate to my work – Seth Godin is a must, Six Pixels of Separation is useful on the digital world, and I am just finding a good source of inspiration in the e-learning area. I scan the headlines of the NBR daily. And that’s it.

Decide what you are interested in and what is relevant to you. I do not follow celebrity cases like Oscar Pistorius. I do not follow sagas like what happened to the Malaysian airline flight – I follow the first event, but not all the speculation. It’s worthless. And my time and attention is worth too much to me.