Information diet

I got a review copy of The 4-Hour Workweek, which has been a fascinating read. I’ll have more thoughts (good and bad) later.

So far my favorite part of the book has come from the section on eliminating what’s not necessary from your life. One chapter is on the “low information diet.” The author quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson: “There are many things of which a wise man might wish to be ignorant.” He then comments:

The first step [to selective ignorance] is to develop and maintain a low-information diet. Just as modern man consumes both too many calories and calories of no nutritional value, information workers eat data both in excess and from the wrong sources.

Guilty!

You may not want to go as far as some of these ideas but here’s what I’ve just done:

• cancelled some of my magazine subscriptions – I get way too many
• cancelled my newspaper subscription as a trial
• pruned Google Reader – always a hard thing to do (still follow 78 blogs)

Some of this happened naturally last year when I wanted to get my thesis done. Now that it’s done, it’s tempting to allow unnecessary stuff to creep back into my life.

Worth reading this post and thinking about how an information diet could fit into your life.