A few days ago I decided that I’d start 2014 with a pretty simple change: To seek less stimulus. I wrote a blog post and a status update sharing my impending Facebook absence. I sent an email at work to no longer expect immediate email responses. The changes ended up being:
- No more Facebook.
- Conditions allowing, moving to limited windows of checking & responding to emails.
- Limiting Twitter + daily consumption of news, RSS, etc to a couple of slugs a day.
Why? Listed in order from most tangible to the most abstracted:
1) Productivity – I’ve chosen to give up these things so that I can be more productive. I feel like I can use time better, specifically towards more directed tasks and projects. I’ve ended every year not accomplishing as much as I had hoped and with a vague notion that I’d left “opportunity on the table.”
2) Stillness – Reducing noise. Constantly checking email, twitter, facebook, espn, techcrunch, et al, did satisfy my curiosity and staved off boredom. But I was never allowing my mind to sit still. Instead I was constantly feeding it stimuli, which caused to to feel constantly “on the go.” At one point I might have considered that a feature. Today that’s very much a bug.
3) Substance – Finally, as explained in my previous post, I did this because I have a number of doubts as to the “realness” of my virtual relationships. Going further, I wonder if rather than being accretive to my life, if they actually hinder the progress I’m trying to make in being a better, happier human.
Since the new year, I’ve read a few blog posts from others trying something similar. Clearly these feelings go beyond me. I don’t think I’m doing anything complicated. I’m just trying to increase the signal-to-noise ratio of my everyday using the most basic of concepts: focus. I’m trying to stay focused on being present in the moment. It’s an ancient and probably overused phrase. My only resolution was to focus more on whatever I chose to experience that day. That partially manifests itself in that above list.
Making this change obviously comes with a cost. After all, nothing’s free. I’ll see many less news stories, pieces of market data, internet memes, and all the rest, making me less well-informed. I’ve always thought my consumption of all this information was a key strength. That my creativity was fueled by connecting the frameworks of all these disparate topics. Yet I think this is tradeoff is worth it. What I’ll gain from thinking more deeply on fewer projects, by being more present in each of my daily experiences, and having more whitespace, will result in its own kind of knowledge, creativity, and happiness. I guess we’ll see.