Minimizing Information Intake

A while back I read through Tim Ferris' The Four Hour Workweek and really got a lot out of it. I'd highly recommend reading through it as it is an easy read. I'll talk more about that later but I want to touch on something that Tim stressed in his book: The Low Information Diet.
In his book he (spoiler alert) challenges the reader to go on a one week media fast from news (websites, papers, magazines, television, etc...), television, and web surfing that's not required for work. Upon reading the challenge I immediately stopped my excess web surfing (reading various blogs that I kept track of just because, LiveJournal, etc...) for a week. I don't really watch television apart from movies with the family but that isn't a huge time sink for me. I found that it wasn't really that hard for me to give up reading the blogs (I've been using Bloglines along with their download-able notifier to keep track on when blogs I watch/read had been posted to) and random surfing that really didn't accomplish a whole lot. LiveJournal also wasn't terribly hard to give up however a side effect of that is that I started feeling out of touch with friends who I only really keep track of via that medium.

After the week was up I started allowing myself to keep up on the blogs and whatnot; however, I found that I didn't really care to keep up on a lot of them that are random tidbits of information with some current happenings online and in real life. I also didn't pick LiveJournal back up which is kind of a mixed blessing. As mentioned above I feel rather out of touch with the folks that I kept up on via LiveJournal however I've been able to free up a lot of time by not going back and checking my friends page frequently.

Today I went through and removed some of the most posted to blogs from the blogs I'm watching in Bloglines in order to limit the amount of time that I spend reading blog posts. I'm going to try to only check blog updates in the evening once I've finished working. I don't have a solution yet for LiveJournal and for the time being I'll just check in on specific friends' journals to catch up on them when they come to mind, or I may create a filter for friends that I'm most interested in keeping up on to limit the amount of extra stuff I'm reading through.

Fun times, back to work.