We are beings capable of limitless love towards each other.

The Human Race – 10k. I did it!

After 4 yours I felt that it is time to move on and try something new. I will join a very small company and will get back to coding. Although, I am really looking forward to do and create new things, I am sad too.

I love this company! A lot …

This exercise was definitely an eye-opener for me. It helped me to understand that I spend an awful lot of time doing stuff that results in little or no value. Feeling exhausted and uncomfortable when thinking back to how the day just passed, another day gone by and I did not achieve anything! Once I started to live by the rules, I noticed something weird. I had time and I got work done! I read books and actually finished them, instead of putting them down after reading 20-50 pages or just not touching them at all.

Another important thing was that I realized that I used these time-consuming tasks to postpone important tasks, to fill it up my time and make me look busy. When I had to write an important email, or do something that would move me out from my comfort zone, I always felt that I had to choose between the important stuff and the easy stuff. Of course, I did pick the easy ones 9 out of 10 times – "Reading the latest Micro ISV Digest or some other random article will do no harm."

But this time around, there was no straying off to read blog posts or browse the web, so that after a while, I had to force myself to do the important stuff and after a while I figured out that they are not that hard, and they can be done in no time. At the end of the day I felt that I had achieved something. This was a good feeling!

I also had a free day scheduled. Every Saturday, I would allow myself to do all the stuff that I couldn’t do during the week. I could finish reading every single web site and blog in about 2 hours on that day and it was just as much fun, but definitely taking less time than checking them twice a day. I guess batching works with blog reading, too!

After two weeks, I slowly slipped backed into my old habits, but I started to think about my tasks and their importance, and sometimes I can force myself to stop doing the easy things and start doing the hard ones! And this is promising, right? There is hope even for me!

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!