I love knowing what my friends and family are up to. I love finding out about the latest thoughts going on within my peer groups. I enjoy reading many blogs, newsletter and emails. I used to regularly get over 400 emails a day including group/mailing list traffic, followed over a thousand people on Twitter and was friends with more than 250 people on Facebook. I subscribed to over 200 blogs. I read all of it, all the time.
Mix in LinkedIn, reddit, Hacker News and a few other corners of the web, and we’re suddenly talking about a lot of data flowing into my head.
I’m led to believe that some even value the contributions I make myself from time to time.
However, I’m about to start dialling all that down. I’ve made a start in some places, but over time I’m going to stop reading anywhere near as much short-form (twitter, Facebook, etc.), a little less medium-long form (blogs), and use the time to start reading longer form work again (books) and creating more.
The reason is not because of burn-out, cynicism or some other excuse: I’m not arguing that it’s all pointless, and I’m not being a Luddite. I just want to create more, and there are only so many hours in the day.
This was prompted by going back over my resolutions posted here in December, and realising I’ve made little progress:
- I need to get my weight down. I’m finally prepared to do something about it.
I’ve been doing a lot of reading up on this in recent months. Worried that as I attempted to cut calories I actually gained weight, I decided to go back to the science the calorie-counting diets are based on and made a shock discovery: there is no science.
There is absolutely no evidence that calorie counting works. Not one experiment has been able to show that calorie-counting is successful.
Managing carbohydrates? Different story.
I’d like to write about this some more, and I’d like to share my diet in detail and provide some raw data almost “live”. Consider it a series of scientific experiments on one person done in public. I need to think about the details of doing this more, but this is one resolution that I need to kick up a gear on above any other.
- I want to create more, so will aim to not go more than two or three consecutive days without working on something creative in 2012. It could be writing (here, for example), it could be code for a personal project, or it could be something I’ve never really tried before (music? art? Don’t know yet). I basically want to spend less time reading/consuming and more time doing stuff. David Tate provides excellent inspirationif you want to consider doing the same. I’ll try to document as much of that as possible here.
I have failed at this dismally. I mean, really, really, really badly. I get to be quite creative in my work, but that wasn’t the goal here. My goal was to be somebody who contributed more online than I took, and in that respect, I’ve failed dismally.
I have a lot of ideas in this regard as to how to correct this fault, but it’s going to take a few weeks of planning to commit to it. I know by reading less social network commentary, blog output and community websites, I’m going to have more time to do that planning, and also to create things.
I work long days, and have just a few hours a day in which to address this, so please be patient with me.
- I’m going to try and shift from always being behind/late for almost everything going on in my life, to being early. I don’t know how I’m going to do this, but I suspect if I can pull it off, I’ll be calmer and happier as a result.
This, I am happy to report, seems to have actually happened for the most part. Public transport not withstanding - including my own self-sabotage - I tend to be where I need to be on-time (or early), far more than I was last year.
Back to the main point: by reading what’s going on out there, by trying out new apps, by listening to all these voices, I am feeling engaged and plugged in, but only as a consumer. The purpose of the Internet is not to simply consume but to create, amend, edit, destroy, vandalise and promote. Ideas, content, products, whatever.
Also, am I the only one who has noticed how exhausting this hosepipe of information can be on a daily - even hourly - basis? I’m tired of consuming. It’s worse than television - at least with television an editor or commissioner has attempted to do some curation.
So I’m not departing, I’m not shutting down accounts, I’m just going to read a great deal less online, to the point the relevant apps might disappear off my phone. In return, I should be able to produce a few new things to share. Watch this space!