More on The Media Fast Experiment (Martin Gordon's Blog (cptncelchu)) by Martin

Today should be day 5 of my media fast experiment, but as I predicted/promised in my previous post, I would sneak a peek on Sunday. And so I did. In about an hour and half yesterday, I made it through 182 posts in Google Reader, less than half of the ~400 a day I was averaging prior to the experiment. Still, despite only lasting three days into the experiment, I've come away with some valuable insight.

First, and perhaps most importantly, bumming around the internet is no longer my go-to action when I've found myself with nothing to do. Even yesterday, when I spent time in Google Reader, I also found time to catch up on some posts for my other blog and even process and upload some photos to Flickr from my trip to Puerto Rico last March.

Google Reader's expanded view, which shows full posts in a river of news format, is a great way to sift through a bunch of garbage while finding the few gems you really enjoy. In an effort to be more selective, I've switched to list view, which shows me headlines for about 25 posts in a way similar to Gmail. Picking and choosing is much easier when you've expanded the number of headlines visible on screen 15-25 times.

The only thing I wish I could do was mark items as read without giving them credit for being read. There's a bunch of stuff in there that I will probably never read, and it looks like it'll build up unless I do choose to mark it as read. A minor complaint, but on the bright side it should make unsubscribing from low signal-to-noise ratio feeds much, much easier (Engadget and the rest of the Weblogs, Inc sites, I'm looking at you).

In response to William's comment, I do think he's right to a degree. If your job is news-driven (you work on Wall Street, in PR, in journalism, etc), then you do have to keep up with the news. Even still, not every news item you come across is 100% relevant and the experiment helps to make that clear. And for those of us whose jobs aren't exactly news driven, much of it isn't relevant - we simply consume it for enjoyment. For most, consumption is way out of balance with production. As with any habit-altering experience, we must often go too far in one direction in order to ultimately end up in the middle.

Technorati Tags: 4 Hour Work Week, Timothy Ferriss, media fast, experiment, productivity

Posted in: books , lifehacks , me , news , productivity

The 4-Hour Work Week Media Fast Experiment (Martin Gordon's Blog (cptncelchu)) by Martin

I recently began listening to Timothy Ferriss' 4-Hour Work Week. The book proposes many interesting ideas, but by far the most immediately applicable are his productivity tips. The one I want to highlight in this post is the media fast experiment, which forces participants to avoid all news for a week. Instead of being the one to relay news to others, be the one asking others what's in the news.

I'm on my third day of the experiment. I've avoided visiting Digg and reading feeds on Google Reader. In an effort to be completely honest, I will admit that I did hit Techmeme yesterday and CNN today for about 5 minutes. I felt guilty both times and that feeling a good sign.

The effects have been moderate, but promising and encouraging. I've been getting more done at work and completing more personal to-do items out of work. Wasting time online is a slave to Parkinson's law (which Ferriss mentions in his book), which basically states that a task will grow to fill the time allotted to it. This is especially true for my RSS subscriptions, which are literally never-ending. Since I wouldn't allot a set time limit to my time-wasting (by definition), my time-wasting would grow to fill time until I got bored or tired.

Depending on how comfortable I feel with being able to control myself, I might allocate (by alarm) an hour or so sometime this weekend to go through Google Reader. Even though the experiment calls for a complete fast, an hour a week is a huge improvement over the multiple hours a day and I should be happy that I haven't gone mad yet with all this newly-recovered spare time.

And I just came across this blog post with a great summary of the book. Check out the productivity tips under Step II: E is for Elimination.

Technorati Tags: Timothy Ferriss, 4 Hour Work Week, news, experiment, media fast, wasting time

Posted in: books , lifehacks , me , news , productivity

Blogging Tip: Declare Tab Bankruptcy (Martin Gordon's Blog (cptncelchu)) by Martin

As a result of all the things I had going on towards the end of school, I kept accumulating Firefox tabs of things I'd like to write about. I never got around to writing about any of them, and the number of tabs kept growing as I neglected to take action on any of them. I did manage to trim them once in a while, posting ones I'd like to look at sometime in the future on del.icio.us and closing others whose time has passed.

Even when I left Philly to come back home, I emailed myself links to the 22 tabs I had open on my iMac so I could open them again on my MacBook. Of course, I never got around to opening them because I had opened new tabs! Yesterday, Firefox crashed and I didn't get a chance to "Restore Session" and all the tabs I had opened disappeared. I wasn't devastated; I was free. The stasis I was experiencing because of my First In, First Out mentality disappeared. I could read a new post and comment on it without having to worry about the 20+ posts I wasn't commenting on.

Declaring email bankruptcy is a great tip for those paralyzed by an overflowing inbox. Similarly, I found that declaring tab bankruptcy helped me overcome my blogging paralysis and finally get a blog post out there. And that opened the floodgates, since this is my second post in less than 24 hours.

So perhaps it would be a good idea to force yourself to close all tabs at the end of the week. Archive the ones you want on del.icio.us, etc, and kiss the others goodbye. Your audience (what's left of it, anyway) will thank you.

Technorati Tags: blogs, blogging, writing, productivity, bankruptcy, email bankruptcy, tab bankruptcy, Firefox, tabbed browsing, del.icio.us

Posted in: blogs , del.icio.us , lifehacks , productivity