Little Big Tomatoes

I am working a full-time job, and doing QiiNinja in my free time, which means that I only have about 2 hours each in the morning to work on QiiNinja, the web site and the blog. After that, I get to the office and work another 8 hours to earn my money. This is like 10 hours work! If only I weren’t so horrible at doing one thing for longer than 10 minutes. Email, web sites, rss feeds and friendly colleagues are always finding me and I am easily distracted from my tasks, only to find out at the end of the day that I didn’t accomplish half of what I wanted to.   

I am now reading a book called 4-Hour Workweek from Timothy Ferris and this is a great book. I am not usually into these i-got-rich-quick-i-show-you-how-i-did-it kinds of books, but this one seems to offer solutions for my problems and make my life easier. One of the concepts introduced here is called "Low Information Diet". It’s about how to break down the flow of information that comes to you. Web sites, newspapers, magazines, books, radio and television deliver so much unnecessary and unwanted information. While you are consuming information in large quantities, at the same time information is consuming your attention and time and I realized early on that my most precious resource is time itself. 

I read hundreds of rss feeds daily, but I cannot really think of anything useful I gathered from them in the last week or so. I listen to dozens of podcasts and while I do really enjoy them, sometimes I feel that I am obliged to listen to them, so I will keep up with the episodes. When I start my browser, it opens up several tabs with search engines, news sites and forums. It is basically begging me to stop doing what I am doing, and start browsing…

So, I decided that I will try to fix my attention deficit and I am going to try the "Low Information Diet" for a week and see how this goes. The first thing that came to mind is to replace my homepages with one single page. My home page looks like this right now:

Low Information Diet – 5-day trial.

Rules
No newspapers, magazines, audiobooks or non-music radio.
No news websites, blogs or rss feeds.
No television at all except 1 hour pleasure viewing each evening.
No reading books, except for this book and one hour of fiction pleasure reading prior to bed.
No web surfing at the desk unless it is necessary to complete a work task for that day.
No email checking, but only in the permitted hours: 12:00 AM and 4:00PM

Permitted websites
LBT Project Page and blog
Work related tools

I copied the rules from the book, so whenever I open up my browser, It will remind me what I can and cannot do. When I was trying to loose weight, I taped the rules of my diet along with my weight graph onto the fridge door, and it helped me to say no whenever I wanted to get some unauthorized snacks. I also created a section of the permitted web sites on this new home page. I will use this as my starting point for any kind of web activity. I have only work and project related sites and tools in this section that I use to do my work.

I will stick to these rules over the next 5 days and will see how it goes!

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