And of course, with food, we have the aforementioned 60,000 diet books available on Amazon.com if we want to get more advanced. Unfortunately, we don’t have the same kinds of resources to draw upon for creating a healthy information diet book, since it’s difficult to dissect individual information resources for their exact nutritional values. On top of that, proposing a list of information one should take in seems nearly reprehensible—who am I to tell you exactly what you should be reading?
Figure 10-3. A sample information nutrition label.
I don’t want to tell you what information to consume, or impose my own biases on you—that wouldn’t be responsible. Instead, I want to give you a framework for information consumption. Like nutrition, you won’t be nearly as successful at this if we focus too much on the food itself; instead, we have to focus on developing healthy habits for information consumption.
But, as I’ve noted before, the Internet moves faster than an author or a publisher, so if you want the latest and greatest resources, please visit InformationDiet.com and visit the wiki where I, along with the community of other readers, will keep an updated list of reliable sources at the bottom of the trophic pyramid.
Consume Consciously
Let’s first define the kind of information consumption that matters for our discussion. When I say consumption, I mean the kind of consumption that requires action on your part to initiate, with something whose purpose it is purely to provide you with information. Watching television, surfing the Web, listening to the radio, playing video games, and reading books, magazines, or newspapers—these are all forms of active information consumption. If it has a channel, a page, a frequency—if it involves you turning it on and off, or you picking it up—that’s the kind of information we’re talking about.
We’re not talking about the information consumption you don’t have explicit control over beginning and ending: advertisements on the side of the road during your commute to work, conversations with friends, families, and the waiter at your local restaurant, or the music in an elevator. While these things do contribute to your overall information intake, you don’t have a lot of control over them, so we can’t do much about them without turning you into a recluse.
We’re also not talking about the production of information for others to consume. While this is part of 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: