The Low Information Diet
“Most information is time-consuming, negative, irrelevant to your goals, and outside of your influence." - Tim Ferriss
Hey friends,
I’ve started another experiment. It’s called the Low Information Diet.
As Tim Ferriss laid it out in The Four Hour Workweek, it consists of the following rules, which I’ve modified slightly for myself:
No social media, cold turkey
No books, except for 1 hour of fiction before bed
No news, audiobooks, podcasts (the only exception is during long Zone 2 cardio sessions)
1 hour of TV for pleasure viewing, at night
No web surfing, unless it’s absolutely necessary for the task at hand
Can check the news for 5 minutes, once a day
Check email for 5 minutes at the end of the day
Music is always fine
My goals with this are to focus on finals, but more importantly recalibrate my attention span and also allow for boredom and creative thought, as I conduct my first extensive annual review. If you’re interested in assessing yourself and learning through reflection about the year, you should definitely check out this template by Anthony Gustin.
As Ferriss describes this “diet”:
“Most information is time-consuming, negative, irrelevant to your goals, and outside of your influence. I challenge you to look at whatever you read or watched today and tell me that it wasn’t at least two of the four.”
Most information consumed nowadays is analogous to a daily dose of a Big Mac and fries. Boredom is like fasting: periodically removing inputs might benefit us, to help us with both overconsumption and thinking more about the quality of our food.
The Low Information Diet is the perfect way to start from zero and reassess daily information consumption. One other thing: it’ll be virtually impossible to stick to those rules without being on Do Not Disturb all day (except from my favorite contacts, of course).
I’ve already noticed this tendency to tap my phone screen to “see what time it is,” when really it’s just an act of looking for notifications or anything to distract me.
I’m interested to see what else comes of this, and I hope you can give it a go. Just try it for a week.
❤️ Favorite Things of the Week
Another Manifestation of Low Expectations
“There’s no difference between a pessimist who says, ‘Oh, it’s hopeless, so don’t bother doing anything,’ and an optimist who says, ‘Don’t bother doing anything, it’s going to turn out fine anyway.’ Either way, nothing happens.” — Yvon Chouinard
Reddit Community
I was doing a childhood nostalgia hunt earlier this week, and came across a Reddit community called r/Nostalgia. It brings back some fun memories, but here was an interesting insight:
“Who would’ve thought how … huge smart phones would be. For reference: I worked at a mobile stand for years and you couldn’t GIVE away text message packages. ‘Why would I want to TYPE a message to someone? I could just call them.’”
I wonder if this generation is missing out on something using texting as the preferred medium of communication. Not hearing voices of people as much. Any thoughts?
How to Take Book Notes
I’ve realized that I’m terrible at concisely summarizing concepts in my own words. I’m one of those people who highlight seemingly everything. I’m guessing this was a lazy habit ingrained from high school English. This strategy will definitely help me and anyone else learn, apply, and retain more concepts while reading books.
To read this on my website, click here.
Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash