How to Remove Distractions With Information Fasting

Today, Ian Nut­tal from Leash Optional explains how to pre­vent the all too com­mon prob­lem of infor­ma­tion over­load with a method called infor­ma­tion fast­ing. Want to write for us too?

In the blo­gos­phere we are over­whelmed with a con­tin­ual feed of new con­tent clocked full of infor­ma­tion. We crave it. Infor­ma­tion is cre­ated, bought, sold, sub­scribed to, com­mented on, shared and picked apart by naysayers.

We as a com­mu­nity love to read new things and dis­cover new blogs, new writ­ers, new ideas and new thoughts.

The prob­lem comes when we con­sume too much infor­ma­tion and for­get to do the impor­tant things: like cre­at­ing remark­able con­tent and build­ing a loyal com­mu­nity for just two examples.

Infor­ma­tion, Diet­ing and Inter­mit­tent Fasting

Infor­ma­tion can eas­ily be com­pared to food and diet­ing. If you overindulge on infor­ma­tion with­out tak­ing action — and by “action” I mean cre­at­ing your own orig­i­nal con­tent, prod­ucts and loyal cus­tomer base — then your mind will become bloated and filled with a mil­lion and one ideas that you’ll never have the time or energy to fully act upon.

Luck­ily, I’ve found a bet­ter solution.

In my quest for get­ting fit and healthy with­out hav­ing to put too much effort into diet­ing, I dis­cov­ered inter­mit­tent fast­ing. I won’t bore you with the details, but the crux of it is this: you restrict calo­rie intake 1 – 3 times per week by fast­ing from the last meal of the day until din­ner time the fol­low­ing day.

This keeps your over­all calo­ries for the week much lower and the ben­e­fits of a calo­rie restricted diet can be found all over the web. Bet­ter still, on those days I don’t have to worry about plan­ning or prepar­ing food and, because I have no food to burn off, my work­outs can be shorter but far, far more effec­tive. I can get more work done in 20 min­utes that I nor­mally would in an hour of con­ven­tional diet­ing and exercising.

And this is how I dis­cov­ered infor­ma­tion fasting.

Infor­ma­tion Fast­ing — A New Way to Remove Distractions

Have you ever found your­self in a busy restau­rant, in line at the movies or just hang­ing out with friends and fam­ily and you just can­not stop look­ing at your phone? Twit­ter, Face­book, RSS feeds, approv­ing blog com­ments, reply­ing to blog com­ments and so on.

What about when you are sup­posed to be work­ing on your blog­ging? Do you ever get dis­tracted mid way through a post and flick over to Twit­ter or start read­ing new sub­scrip­tions in your feed reader? You know that you should be work­ing hard on build­ing up your blog but you are just a slave to the information.

Here are some of the ben­e­fits of infor­ma­tion fasting:

• You make eye con­tact with more peo­ple. I’ve found myself read­ing some­thing on my iPhone when a friend or fam­ily mem­ber has tried to talk to me and sud­denly I realise just how rude I’m being. Put down the phone, close your lap­top lid and actu­ally look at peo­ple when you talk to them. You can’t con­nect with some­one if you are dis­tracted and your mind is elsewhere.
• You actu­ally lis­ten to peo­ple. Have you ever mis­un­der­stood or even com­pletely ignored ques­tions from peo­ple while you were con­sum­ing infor­ma­tion? It annoys them, makes you look igno­rant and causes bad vibes all around. Not great if you’re try­ing to cre­ate awe­some blog posts.
• You become active instead of pas­sive. Don’t be the pas­sive mem­ber of your group who is there but isn’t really “there”. Focus on the right now and get involved in the con­ver­sa­tion. Not only will you not look like a douche, remov­ing the cloud in your mind by focus­ing on some­thing else is often the time when you have the best ideas for new blog posts, prod­ucts or expansions.
• Get more done in less time. With­out all the dis­trac­tions you will accom­plish more work in much less time than you ever have before. Use it to dou­ble your daily pro­duc­tiv­ity or half your over­all time spent work­ing on your blog. Either way, you win.
• You can be awe­some as your­self. It’s not just about the dis­trac­tions that will sti­fle your blog, it’s also that the opin­ions and thoughts in your head will be influ­enced by other blogs if all you do is read them. Take them out of the equa­tion and you start to think for your­self. You’ll gen­er­ate thoughts, ideas and opin­ions that are your own. You become awe­some being you — not regur­gi­tat­ing what Dar­ren Rowse has already said.

It does take some will power on your part to stick to this, but the clar­ity you expe­ri­ence and the amaz­ing ideas you gen­er­ate will be far greater than the minor dis­com­fort you feel by not hav­ing your con­stant stream of information.

How to Start Infor­ma­tion Fast­ing Today

To get started with infor­ma­tion fast­ing is actu­ally quite easy. I like to do it cold turkey. You may want to adjust tim­ings and ramp up to it slowly, but this is my process:

Step 1. Elim­i­nate Distractions

The first thing I did is to set my iPhone to never retrieve emails unless I do it man­u­ally. Push emails were one of my biggest pro­duc­tiv­ity failures.

When it comes to your com­puter, you have a cou­ple of choices. You could use a pro­gram like Self­Con­trol if you have a Mac (if you use Fire­fox and Grease­mon­key then you can use this guide instead) which will allow you to block dis­tract­ing sites for a set period of time.

I have never needed to do this and believe that build­ing up your will power is far more ben­e­fi­cial in the long term.

Instead, I make sure that no pro­grams run auto­mat­i­cally at start up. This means no Tweet­deck, MSN, Skype or any other type of dis­trac­tion. I used to have per­ma­nent tabs on Fire­fox for GMail and GReader but I got rid of them too.

On my phone, I placed all my dis­trac­tion apps (Skype, Tweet­deck, Face­book, Feed Reader) onto the 4^th page of the phone. Out of sight, out of mind seems to be the best pol­icy when start­ing out.

Step 2. Set The Fast­ing Period

Once you have removed the dis­trac­tions and made it more dif­fi­cult to retrieve infor­ma­tion, it’s time to set a length for the fast. My per­sonal fave has been 24 hours. I usu­ally do this from 10pm until 10pm the fol­low­ing night.

You can start out at half a day if you feel it would be bet­ter to ease your­self in grad­u­ally but I think most peo­ple should be able to go 24 hours quite easily.

Obvi­ously if you use email or Skype or what­ever for work — free­lance blog design­ers for exam­ple — then that isn’t included in the fast. We are fast­ing on non-essential infor­ma­tion here.

Once you have a set period, it can be a good idea to get a friend, col­league or fam­ily mem­ber to keep you on track if you start to slip. Noth­ing makes me want to avoid Twit­ter more than a stern glance from my girlfriend!

Step 3. Fill­ing The Gap With Some­thing Remarkable

Work­ing with no plan is a sure­fire way to let your mind wan­der and before you know it you’re 4 hours into a 24 marathon and liv­ing vic­ar­i­ously through Jack Bauer! Instead, set a list of things you want to achieve dur­ing the fast.

I’m not talk­ing about hun­dreds of items here or big things like world peace. It just needs to be some­thing tan­gi­ble that keeps you account­able dur­ing your vaca­tion from infor­ma­tion. For me, it might look like this:

• Fin­ish guest post arti­cle for Blo­gus­sion and sub­mit for approval.
• Brain­storm logo designs for new ebook cover.
• Work out.
• Write draft post for Leash Optional.

See, noth­ing ground­break­ing but it keeps my mind on what I need to achieve and off Kelly Diel’s Cleav­age.

One final point I want to make is that after you fin­ish the fast, don’t rush off to Google Reader and then pro­ceed to digest every sin­gle post that was pub­lished dur­ing your fast. That defeats the whole object of doing the fast in the first place.

I might get some back­lash for this, but after a fast I tend to sim­ply mark all items as read. If the con­tent is note­wor­thy and awe­some, then it will more than likely pop up on my Twit­ter stream anyway.

Don’t worry about miss­ing out. The object of the fast is to enlighten you. You’re only miss­ing 24 hours of infor­ma­tion. Tomor­row there will be plenty more to con­sume. The day after more than that, and it will con­tinue until the end of time. The point here is to stop becom­ing a slave to information.

Become the mas­ter of infor­ma­tion, cre­ate truly awe­some and unique con­tent with­out dis­trac­tions and you will build a com­mu­nity of loyal fol­low­ers that trust you and buy prod­ucts from you.

Doesn’t that sound bet­ter than fran­ti­cally try­ing to get through your unread feed reader items at 3am?

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