Journal

Overwhelmed

Matthew Solle has written a smart and thoughtful piece on dealing with information overload – Taking a break from The Internets, and waiting – a theme I’ve been coming back to over and over again as I, er, consume endless RSS feeds, tweets, podcasts…

‘My mind a grid of content, links, pictures, feeds all churning on and on, never stopping. There is only impatience and crushed concentration (and often pitiful constructive output). I feel an intense need to brush all the screens aside and get my day in order. To relearn how to concentrate and to (really) get things done.’
Matthew Solle, Taking a break from The Internets, and waiting

A couple of things to share on this. One, a work anecdote. I used to regularly have conversations with members of my team that routinely went like this:

Them: ‘I really need to get this IA/proposal/report finished. Can I work from home?’
Me: ‘What’s stopping you doing it from here?’
Them: ‘Well, you know, dealing with emails and phone calls from clients’
Me: ‘Have you closed Outlook and put your phone on voicemail?’
Them: [Silence]

I know this because I’d had it said to me by my own manager, and I’d responded in exactly the same way as my colleagues did. It somehow seemed against the rules to be beyond contact in this way. Latterly, I’ve often done exactly this – set out of office emails that don’t tell lies but explain I’m not picking up emails on a particular date, turned off my phone, and managed, just, to stay out of the various social networks that can sap my energy every day. All just to dampen the roar of information flooding into inboxes and unread feed counts.

The second lies closer to home. I’ve become very conscious of just how distracted I’ve become, how poor a listener – chatting and half-listening while tweeting, reading, watching TV simultaneously. And so I’ve decided to try to do something about it. Matthew rightly talks in his piece about the need to have a method, a structure. Mine, inspired in part by Liz Danzico’s own piece on Liquidity as luxury, has been to do the following:

• replaced my usual commute with a bike ride, reducing time sat on trains idly reading tweets and blogs
• tried to avoid lifting my laptop out of my bag unless I actually need to (marking this down as a work in progress)
• at weekends, avoiding committing every geeky parent’s guilty secret – reading Twitter, feeds et al. while looking after my kids
• stopped using Foursquare and Facebook altogether
• stopped watching TV in the evening (watching the Arsenal highlights last night was the second time we’ve had the TV on in the evening since the Tour de France concluded)
• finally, but perhaps critically, got smarter about how I use my feed reader of choice – Fever – and marked down a whole swathe feeds as ‘sparks’ rather than ‘kindling’

So far it’s working. I’m reading more books, spending more time in conversation, sleeping better and feeling considerably more content with my lot. But, as Matthew says, it isn’t easy:

‘You have to carve out the space for it to happen. You have to train yourself. You have to ignore the voices that whisper what you are missing.’

Further reading

• Alan de Botton On Distraction