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.
Mass affirmation is the refined sugar of the mind—I’m not talking about the kind of relatively rare positive affirmation you get from friends or family, telling you that you’re loved and respected. Rather, it’s the mass affirmation: the affirmations you get that aren’t intended for you specifically, the stuff that television is best at, but also permeates through all of our information delivery mechanisms. The suppliers that make a living telling you how right you are are the ones you ought to avoid the most.
I try to limit myself to no more than 30 minutes a day of mass affirmation, and strive to consume much less. It means making some tough choices, and letting go of some things you might enjoy. At a maximum of a half-hour a day, for some liberals, it means having to make the dreaded decision of choosing between Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart, and a regimen of DailyKos. For the conservative, it may mean having to pick between Fox and Friends for a half-hour in the morning, and a half-hour of Bill O’Reilly in the evening.
Consume Locally
The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (Del Rey) by Douglas Adams starts off with the book’s protagonist, Arthur Dent, having his flat completely demolished by a local government agency, thanks to an eminent domain ruling to build a highway through his apartment building. The notice, it’s written, was to be found in the bowels of a government building, up for “public display.”
Perhaps Dent was too obsessed with US Weekly, or news from far away. Our obsession with national news over local news has to end. While it’s important to stay abreast of national and world affairs, most of us give too much weight to information that’s not actionable and relevant to our daily lives. There are more dealers of junk, more profits involved, and more lies to be told as we sit higher on the trophic pyramid.
A healthy information diet means the avoidance of overprocessed information. A healthy information dieter constantly tries to remove these junk dealers from the consumption chain. That means either consuming locally or working consistently to remove distance to the things that you investigate.
Consuming low on the metaphorical trophic information pyramid doesn’t mean just sticking closer to the facts; it also means that it’s easier to stick close to the facts when you stick close to home. The further away from home you get, the more attention you have to pay to how many operators have been involved in getting you that information.
Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, once quipped, to the alarm of many an activist: “A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa,”[84] and while I too bemoan the trivialization of famine, genocide, and HIV—he has a point. You alone can go get the squirrel and clean it up and prevent your neighborhood from smelling like dead animal. Chances are, you’re unable to solve famine, rid the continent of Africa from evil warlords, and cure HIV all by yourself. Local news is more actionable and relevant to the individual than global issues.
Luckily, there’s a renaissance going on in the world of local news—new tools allow you to get online and see news and information down to the narrowest geographic criteria possible: your block. Today, major cities and government agencies are releasing information by the gigabyte that informs us on the real goings-on in our neighborhoods.
If you’re in one of the dozens of cities lucky enough to be covered by Everyblock, I highly recommend it as an important daily source of information. The site aggregates dozens of data feeds that come from local governments and turns them into an easy-to-read, relatively opinion-free way of seeing what’s going on at the block level—and you’d be surprised how much information there is about your single block.
Everything from bulk trash pickups to police reports to photos taken in your neighborhood to recent real estate listings are available for you. You register for the service, plug in your address, and tell the service whether you are interested in getting information about your city, your neighborhood, or the area within an eight-block, four-block or even one-block radius of where you live.
The site also allows you to post messages to other people in your neighborhood so you can talk about the issues affecting your real, local community. It makes the information that comes out of your community immediately actionable, and allows people to connect with their neighbors easily.
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http://books.google.com/books?id=PxTvbM-VCPEC&lpg=PA296&ots=DSf8nQQX5i&dq=a%20squirrel%20dying%20in%20front%20of%20your%20house%20may%20be%20more%20relevant%20to%20your%20interests%20right%20now%20than%20people%20dying%20in%20Africa%20Zuckerberg&pg=PA296#v=onepage&q=a%20squirrel%20dying%20in%20front%20of%20your%20house%20may%20be%20more%20relevant%20to%20your%20interests%20right%20now%20than%20people%20dying%20in%20Africa%20Zuckerberg&f=false