Stop consuming crappy info

Intro

With all the abundance of information around us, sometimes (well, I'd say most of the time) we get overwhelmed. We got used to browse through the tv channels almost without realizing, or checking for a new email each minute, or maybe see what likes and comments we got on Facebook. I must say, all these distractions make harder and harder to focus on the things that MATTER in our day-to-day activity.

Problem(s)

One day, on O'Reillys 'Deals of the Day' I saw one book called "Information diet" and it caught my attention so I bought it. Basically, the book tries to make a parallel between what a diet is for food and what it could be for information that we come in contact with each day. (1) It seems that our brain was wired to always search for new things and this is powered by dopamine. When a new email arrives or a new tweet and the notification pops up, dopamine is released in the brain which makes us to search even more. Because of this, in time, our habits change and soon we will not be able to focus on one thing without checking different websites or our phone or the messenger list.

(2) Besides this valid point about our daily attention span, the author, Clay Johnson, argues that the current media providers made a mission from providing us crappy info (these are my words, not his ). In current days, many media websites apply different solutions to track the visitor and see what he wants to read, what links he clicks more often and show him especially content related to his profile so he clicks more, therefore more money for the media company. Journalists are more like content gatherers paid per article, with a daily quota, to be encouraged to generate as many articles per day as possible.

Basically, the two main parts of the "problem" are social networks and the fact that media providers don't care about informing us anymore, just to serve us content we 'like'  as cheap as possible. (3) There is an extent to the second issue and that's serving you content that only corresponds to your online profile, something that Google and Facebook do everyday, they contain you only in your interest "bubble". So if you search for something and in the results is something you might be interested but doesn't fit with the choices you made in the past, you'll probably don't see it in the first results.

Solution(s)

(1) One simple solution for all the distracting notifications from emails, Twitter, Facebook and so on, would be to turn them off. Because, let's face it, unless you don't work in social media or something that requires you to monitor them, this constant distractions don't do any good.  But like any addiction, the habit still remains so you should try to make short alternations between work and pause, with the goal of maximizing the work part. Check out the Tools page on the books site, it has some interesting suggestions and I personally like SaneBox, but we'll see more about it later.

(2) In general we should be more selective with the information we receive. Most of the time it is not shoved into our heads, we voluntarily let it in. For sure we can all recognize the crappy medias, because the quality of their content is really low, we should just avoid them, because in the end we are (still) in control. Clay set up a repository on GitHub with interesting books on this matter, personalities from different fields, blogs etc. and we can all contribute to it.

(3) For this matter I don't really know what we could easily do. Clay makes a reference to Eli Pariser's book called The Filter Bubble and there's also a TED talk of his you might want to check out.

Conclusion

Even though the lack of an information diet is not as obvious as for a food diet, I think it has a big impact on our long term life and how we spend our time. I found "Information diet" very interesting, it has many examples and touches other related topics and even if it doesn't give you a guaranteed solution it makes you realize that something can be changed in your life to be focused more on the important things. I dare you to check it out!