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2010 Unplugged

2010 is the year of information emancipation for me. No, I’m not setting more information free, I’m making drastic cuts to the information I consume, and, increasingly, feel enslaved by. I’m emancipating myself from the slavery of information.

To kick the year off I’ve quit all LinkedIn groups but one. I no longer follow anyone on Twitter (I still transmit, I just don’t receive). I’ve eliminated all my Google alerts except for my name. I’ve disabled all unnecessary email notifications generated by my website. I’ve unsubscribed from most email-based news sources and newsletters. (I still collect agency newsletters, but now they go straight into a folder for later reading.) I haven’t yet seen the inside of Facebook and I won’t in 2010.

My goal is to get my information intake down to about 30% of what it was last year and, hopefully, reverse the slave-master relationship I have with information. I may be making a mistake, but truthfully, I know that I cannot be. Just like it was not a mistake to try any of these things in the first place. Action yields information, whereas inaction leaves us only with guesses. But if the information gained by the actions we undertake does not inform our subsequent actions, what then was the point of acting in the first place?

Fourteen years ago we unplugged the television in our house, and I know from that experience that it’s only the idea of damming the information stream that is difficult, not the act itself. Thirty days later you cannot remember what was so important, what programming it was that you thought you could not live without. What you do remember is the months, even years, of wasted time. You never really shake that sense of how careless you were with your most prized asset.

While I’ve been proud of and even smug about cleaning up my personal information consumption, the truth is I have replaced television, radio, newspapers and magazines with the Internet, all under the guise of work. It’s time to admit that email, the web and its social media tools have become my television – my distraction disguised as work. It’s time to clean house.

Cutting off social media participation is easy for me. My job, as I see it, is to create content and make it easy for those that are more proficient at connecting and multi-tasking to distribute that content if they deem it worthy. I benefit from Twitter, but not so much from my active use of it, rather, from others Tweeting my content.

Cutting back on web browsing is easy, too. Beyond real productive web-based work, I have about five sites I visit. I don’t need to trawl the web for inspiration. I’d be happy with no new ideas for all of 2010. I’m drowning in them.

No, the real challenge in information management for me is going to be in email management. I am far from having all the answers. I think I’ve happened upon three good first steps. First, unsubscribe from everything that is not vital. Second, use rules to dump certain items into folders for review once a day or once a week. Third, never click on a link that is not preceded by a synopsis. “Check this out…” is going to be met with shift-delete. Beyond that, I’ll make it up as I go along and be content with constant progress.

If you’ve been through this and have some email management tips that actually work I’d love to hear them. Yes, you can email them to me. :)