Work-Life Innovation |

In some cases less really is more. As you all no doubt are very much aware, there is a glut of data out there and the question is no longer how do I get the right information, but rather when do I stop looking at the data so that I can act? In my days as a grad student I remember spending months reading around my subject looking for an angle that would give me my thesis topic. The trouble was there was just too much to cover, and every article led to five more. I felt I never had enough information to make a decision about where to put my stake in the ground and formulate my thesis topic. This went on through most of the first year until my supervisor took me aside and told me to stop reading and start thinking! It was the right advice. Conceivably, I could have spent the rest of my PhD reading around my area without reaching any conclusions. Instead of reading the thoughts of others, I needed to think my own, generate some questions and find out how to answer them myself.

More recently, I have been testing out a few techniques to manage my information intake, both personally and professionally. This has involved some tough decision making with regard to what I choose to pay attention to and what I’m willing to let go. Below I describe what I’ve done to reduce the information I have to cope with to help make me more effective at work and to make my day-to-day life more fun.

My work is as data intensive as my PhD was, but in a different way. Nowadays I get given the problems I have to solve, and I have to find the information that will enable me to do that. However, I am often faced with the same problem of there simply being too much data. To be effective I have to resolve issues quickly and that means I have to find good enough information that will enable me to make a decision in the time available. It’s a game of percentages. Herbet Simon called this satisficing, and in today’s world it’s a technique we all have to master. To help me in this, I have been organising the data channels that feed information to me in my job (see my posts about managing email and instant messenger for some examples). By filtering out irrelevant information, I can ensure that the signal to noise ratio of my data is low. Other techniques I use are to ask myself whenever I am faced with information, “How can I use this?”, and if I can’t, I drop it.

Personally too, this technique can pay good dividends. I used to subscribe to many different RSS feeds, which involved reviewing, organising and fretting over them if I hadn’t read them; so I cut down on them drastically, until now I have just two! I also tackled my TV watching habits. I grew up in a family that seemed to organise all of its time around the TV, never missing a soap or favourite sitcom. Often eating dinner in front of it and spending countless evening sprawled on the sofa watching whatever was on. Even Christmas Day was punctuated with “un-missable” key TV events such as the big Xmas movie. These days all that has changed. My TV now sits in the corner gathering dust, and the thought of not having a TV no longer fills me with fear. Magazines have also been jetissoned. They are simply too expensive, and can almost always be bettered by a savvy web search or a trip to Wikipedia. Magazines can lead to the worst examples of media grazing, where you simply flick from page to page to no good end, and often put them down with no real recollection of what you have just read! As for beauty magazines, Baz Luhrmann got it right in his song Sunscreen: “Do not read beauty magazines, they will only make you feel ugly”; add to that list lifestyle, health and fitness and TV/celebrity gossip magazines.

As a result of making such changes to my information intake habits, I am a lot less distracted by the unimportant. I am better able to focus on things that are important to me, both in my work and in my private life. Moreover, I don’t feel uninformed at all! I feel much more focused on what I want to do and the issues I want to engage in, and I find a perverse joy in not knowing what happened on Eastenders last night, or what Amy Winehouse has done next. Important things that I should know about invariably come my way regardless, without having to media graze to find them. Once they do, a quick visit to the BBC news website can usually fill me in on all I need to know if I feel its necessary.

Here are 7 tips to gradually break your information habit and quit media grazing:

1. Follow my tips on managing email and instant messenger for a one week trial period, and see if your effectiveness increases.
2. Make a list of all the great classic books you’ve never read and start to go through that list (have a look at Lists of Bests for ideas). You’d be surprised how much of a good book you can get through in an evening’s sitting. Consider switching some of your TV/magazine reading time for book reading. Discover why the world’s great literature is called great!
3. Record how much time you actually spend watching TV over a week, multiply it over 6 months. Think about other, more fun things you could have done with that time. Plan to do one of those things over the next 6 months, for example you could learn a foreign language, exercise, or take a salsa class…
4. For the upcoming week, when you are about to read an article or watch a TV show pause and ask yourself the question “What can I use the information contained within it for? If you can’t identify a reason, don’t read/watch it.
5. Cancel your subscriptions! Stop reading your usual information feeds for a week and check at the end if you feel uninformed. Rediscover the forgotten art of hearing about the news from friends and family.
6. Switch off the TV! Instead, go outside and visit some of your region’s beautiful cities or national parks. (see what others experienced after ditching the TV).
7. Consider having a total media blackout for a week - no TV, radio, magazines, internet, emails, phone (Music is ok). See if the world ends!

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