I recently listened to the TED Radio Hour on Attention. And then I listened again, paying much closer attention. What I heard has given me a lot of food for thought.

I listen to the TED Radio Hour of NPR with some regularity. Mostly it’s informative, but there are times when a show will pick me up by the neck and shake me.

So it was for the show on attention.

You can listen to the show here: Attention Please(MP3)

The thing that caught my attention (!) about this show is that it points out with directness that our modern life is being chosen for us. This comes from the algorithms that suggest the next video to watch (and one just a bit edgier), or the alerts that are training us to self-interrupt and destroying our focus.

All of these things are modifying our behavior.

It’s fine if that is what you are consenting to.

But I know that this show made me stop and think about what I am allowing. Capturing my attention is a bid to modify my behavior. And I am not consciously choosing to allow companies to pick what I will buy/think/read/do. That’s got to stop.

I’d be interested to hear what you have to think about the show. (Please don’t comment unless you’ve taken the time to listen)

Wednesdays are simplicity days at SimpleProductivity blog.

One of the things that has happened in the past few years is that magazines have crept back into my life. At one point I had cancelled all subscriptions except one. Yet when I looked around last weekend, I found seven different magazines in my to-read pile.

I can’t keep up with this many magazines, which is why I have a to-read pile.

Clearly this has gotten out of hand. I need to trim out the fat here. I need to add print media to my media diet.

Newspapers and News Magazines

This isn’t a problem for me, because we only get the paper on Sunday, and I don’t touch it. Some people, though, end up with daily papers piling up.

If you are one of these people, you need to do two things: throw out the backlog, and ramp down your subscription.

Why throw out the backlog? Let’s face it…news media are time sensitive. If you haven’t read the news during the day, it will be outdated by tomorrow. Get rid of them.

If you find yourself with a consistent backlog, it is time to re-evaluate your subscription. We did this a few years ago. We realized the only time we read the paper was on weekends. Since our local paper doesn’t offer a weekends-only plan, we went with just Sundays. See if you can get the paper in a frequency that fits your schedule.

(Or you could do without. I rely on people around me to tell me when something important happens. I haven’t missed a single important news event by going this route.)

Magazines

For non-news magazines, the question becomes how much value am I getting out of the publication.

I will admit that I will buy magazines in the grocery checkout line because I am attracted by the headlines on the covers. Invariably, I find that I am disappointed in the story attached to the headlines.

Many magazines recycle the same themes over and over again, particularly women’s magazines: organization, diet, cooking, desserts (I just love it when they tack the dessert article right after the diet article), cleaning, finances, relationships.

So the question for these becomes “Am I getting enough value from these magazines to justify me buying them or continuing the subscription?”

Here are my magazines:

• Reader’s Digest. I find myself uplifted by the stories and laughing at the jokes. It stays.
• Women’s World. I like 5 regular features, but find the other health, diet and cooking articles a distraction. A candidate for cancellation, especially since it is a weekly magazine.
• Women’s Day and Family Circle. Always, always I am disappointed in the quality of the articles and the inability to distinguish ads from content. I have to stop buying them.
• Mother Earth News. I love the articles on gardening and cooking, and actually use the information. This one stays.
• National Geographic. No one reads this. Cancel.
• Architectural Digest. My daughter wanted this one, but it ends up in my piles. I don’t like the magazine because the interiors are too perfect and too expensive. Cancel.
• Birds and Blooms. I use the gardening information and ideas. It stays.

So after my media diet, I will be left with three magazines that I enjoy and read.

I have made the determination how to get rid of information overload that is coming at me in print media by assessing my magazines. Are you overwhelmed with print media? Share below.

Photo by theseanster93. Licensed under Creative Commons.

Wednesdays are simplicity days at SimpleProductivity blog.

They’re all over the place on the web: give us your email address, and we’ll send you a great free something and a newsletter. I know this, and I do it myself.

It also happens in paper: give a charitable organization some money, and suddenly you are getting a paper newsletter or magazine.

But what happens when you realize that you are inundated?

Corralling newsletters, commence.

The Old Label Trick

With most email programs, you can filter your messages by sender and put them in a per-determined place. That seems to be the advice of the moment…put them somewhere and read them when you have time.

But what happens when you open that folder to find dozens of emails, and you lose site of the stuff you really care about?

Or the provider breaks their word and instead of sending one email a month, you get one a day? Or your postal box is filled with updates?

It’s time to put the newsletters on a diet.

Purge The Backlog

When there is too much to read, it’s time to purge. Don’t worry – all these newsletters will come around again.

As far as possibly missing out on information, the time it will take you to sift through everything will outweigh the value of any possible nugget found.

Assess

Next, you need to assess each newsletter as it comes in.

Is this something you are interested in? No? Look for the unsubscribe link on the bottom of the email. (By U.S. law there is supposed to be one…)

Is it something you want to read, but less frequently? Look for options at the bottom of the email to change your frequency.

If it is paper and you don’t want to read it, call the charity and ask to have it canceled. They will surely appreciate saving the money! Or use a service such as Catalog Choice to remove yourself from the list.

Avoid Another Backlog

One of the things that I found is that by shuffling newsletters off into a folder other than my inbox, I wasn’t reading the newsletters. They weren’t in front of me, so I ignored them until there were too many to ignore.

Since I use GMail, I still label them as newsletters, but I leave them in my inbox to be processed with the rest of my mail. Often I find it takes less than 30 seconds to skim the article and decide if there is anything in there worth a closer look. (More soon on my latest email revamp)

I also apply the same rule to newsletters (both electronic and paper) that I do to magazines. If the last issue hasn’t been read when I receive the new one, the old one goes in the trash.

Have you dealt with purging your newsletters? Share below.

Photo by Esparta. Licensed under Creative Commons.

As I recently wrote, I have been working to pare down how much information I have coming into my life. I was taking in so much and it was becoming less and less valuable as I struggled to keep up with everything coming at me.

So I have gone on a media diet. I have been paring online information intake. Today’s article will show you how I got my online sources purged and to a reasonable level.

Websites

There is so much information out there on the web these days! If you want to know something, it can be found on the Web.

I was accumulating all sorts of site that I wanted to look at regularly. These sites included information on just about everything, including news, blogs, and general information.

News

The first thing I did was consolidate my news. When Google announced that it was doing away with its iGoogle interface, I had switched to finding my news on the various news sites. I went back to something similar to iGoogle, called IGHome.com. I put all my news feeds onto one page there and now I check one place for news.

But there is more…I noticed that I had too much news coming at me. So I limited my news sources to NPR and the BBC coverage of the U.S. I find that I get the major stuff without the obsessive star-crazed and over-analyzing of tragedies. After all, I really don’t care what happens in Justin Bieber’s or any of the Kardashian’s lives. It simply is noise in my world.

Websites

General websites (not blogs) that I was checking frequently were usually about inspiration. By switching all of these to deliver to my email, I stopped having to go to various places every morning for inspiration.

This also had the wonderful effect of speeding up my initial browser launch, because fewer tabs were loading.

Comics

The only part of our local newspaper that I read regularly is the comics. Because we do not get the paper daily, I had been getting the Comics by going to the online versions every day. Even in RSS, I was still having to click through to websites to see the funnies.

I replaced this with two outlets: the first is the Arcamax application for my iPad, which brings my favorite comics to me daily in an app, and the GoComics website, which allows me to tag my favorites and scroll through only my favorites. I read both of these while I am eating breakfast. While some people might consider it noise, I like starting my day this way.

Blogs

Blogs are websites, but I rarely read the blogs on the web. I use RSS, which I won’t try to define because there are many variations of what the letters supposedly stand for. RSS is simply a way to take all of the blogs your read and get the content in one place.

Even with Google Reader (my reader of choice) going away in July, I am still doing RSS. Mr. Reader, the software I use to read blogs, will do something, and I will follow it along because the software makes the feeds manageable.

Even if you think a blog doesn’t offer an RSS feed, it probably does. If I can’t find the button, I just add “/feed/” to the URL and I will generally be presented with the RSS feed.

RSS

Funny that I should just have talked about adding feeds to my RSS reader…because this was the place I did the most purging.

When I looked at all the blogs I was following, it was nearly 300. Some of those feeds published once a week. Most publish daily. And some put out dozens of articles per day.

And the quality of the information was not worth having to wade through all the articles.

Organize

I first grouped my blogs into categories. Things like productivity, organization, parenting are the main categories. I made myself stick to the rule of one category per blog, because otherwise it felt like I never escaped some of the larger blogs’ reaches.

Evaluate

Some of the blogs brought limited value. These blogs are rehashes of other people’s blogs, topics warmed over. If there was a blog that consolidated these type of blogs, I kept the consolidation and let the others go (Lifehacker stayed, and 12 blogs left).

Some of the blogs were interesting from a novelty standpoint, but the news really doesn’t impact me. So they went. Fast Company was one of these.

Some of the blogs I found highly entertaining, but yet they didn’t bring me any practical value. These were the hardest to let go of, but Tanis Miller and The Bloggess went with much regret.

The rest of the blogs I looked at for three weeks. If I didn’t open an article from these blogs in that three week period, the blogs were sidelined. Whether this is the fault of poor headlines or just a mismatch between me and the material, I needed to clean these out.

End result: 56 feeds.

It took some struggle, but I finally got the web information down to a reasonable level. By changing the way I got my news, changing some websites for apps and email, converting others to RSS and then drastically reducing my RSS feed numbers, I feel like I have changed this from crashing ocean waves to gentle lakefront waves.

Photo by epSos.de. Licensed under Creative Commons.

Wednesdays are simplicity days at SimpleProductivity blog.

It was a quote that got me thinking about it: “information is not knowledge.” I have so much information thrown at me every day, yet I feel like I learn little.

I had gone on a media fast a few years ago, but honestly, things have crept back up there. I started to check the news frequently, parse dozens of blogs and websites, read all sorts of magazines, just because I was afraid I would miss something.

My grandparents, and even my parents, never had to deal with this. There was the radio, of course, and the weekly newspaper. Few magazines were present, and they had no internet or television. And they were able to lead productive lives, without the drain of constant media in their lives.

As I thought about the reality of my ancestor’s existence, I realized something: I was deep in information overload.

Signs of Information Overload

I found, for myself, that my signs of information overload showed up in the following ways:

• I was spending hours each week reading Facebook
• I was reading the news at least three times a day
• I had expanded my news sources to include four out-of-country sources
• My blog reading list had expanded to the point where I was plowing through almost 2000 articles a week
• I was reading 4 (!) technical books at once
• I would stop in the break room at work to check out what was going on via the television
• My podcast subscription count was up over 20
• I was reading every linked article people emailed me…from my mother to strangers contacting me through the blog

The result was that I wasn’t taking anything in. I felt like I was drinking from a firehouse. As a serious introvert, I realized that not only do crowds of people drain my energy, but media drains my energy too.

The Media Diet

I had to do something.

I am not willing to give up the energy I have to things that have no value. I would rather be wholeheartedly present for a game of catch with my daughter than to be thinking about other things and get beaned by the ball (true story).

My solution was a media diet. Not a complete fast, as is recommended by a popular author. But a weeding out so that I could find a manageable solution for me.

It is not unlike a food diet. The goal of a food diet is to get yourself to eat healthful food in the right quantities.

The media diet means that I have to find the good sources, and the right quantities.

Where To Look

This is a very large undertaking. In the next few weeks, I will talk about how I pared back my consumption and right-sized what I was taking in. I will go through each area and tell you exactly what I did to get rid of the excess, and to find the quality that would give me what I needed.

In the next four weeks, I will be talking about:

• Online sources (RSS, websites, blogs)
• Newsletters and email lists (and organizing email in general)
• Print media (magazines and newspapers)
• Other media (television, radio, podcasts, DVRs and streaming)

It is possible. You can get your information back to the point where you are taking in what you need in the right doses.

Photo by faith goble. Licensed under Creative Commons.