The Information Diet

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 palpitations. 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.

You can also increase your social time, spending time talking with your spouse, family, and friends. Another good use of your time is giving your mind a chance to digest the things that you’ve read by taking long walks, spending time exercising, or even meditating.

Nutrition isn’t just about what or how much to eat, it’s about eating balanced meals. Just like the new recommendation graphic from the government recommends that our plate consist of 30% grains, 30% vegetables, 20% protein, and 20% fruit washed down with a glass of milk, we’ve got to come up with a healthy means of consciously consuming information.

Unfortunately, we can’t make an exact replica of MyPlate.gov for information—we don’t have the kinds of neurological research out there to figure out what a healthy, complete diet truly looks like. But like Banting, we do know the kinds of things we ought to consume less of.