Compared to many folks my internet diet isn’t that bad. I have about fifty RSS feeds, about a dozen people I’m following on Twitter and I haven’t even gotten to Facebook yet. Looking at some of those I follow around on the ‘net those numbers are quite low. (Robert Scoble is an outlier – I’m convinced he’s taken the red pill and can now manipulate the Matrix at will.)
Still, it’s gotten to be too much. I had dozens of bookmarks in my To Read folder and just as many in my Later folder (I’m positive that one day I’ll need to know the differences between LLCs, S corps and C corps and I won’t have a prayer without that bookmark!). Keeping up with Twitter and RSS feeds had become a chore.
Then I realized the problem: Inbox Zero is a myth.
Why? If you’re here and you’re hip to the whole Web 2.0 and social media thing, then email is not your only inbox. You also have a feed reader and a Twitter client and whatever new app some teenagers cooked up during detention last week.
It’s easy to unconsciously treat these things like paper inboxes, like containers of incoming information that can be read and filed and purged until empty.
But social media aren’t message inboxes. They’re doorways to rooms in a cafe that never closes. You may find recordings of the conversations that took place in a particular room before you got there, but is that really how you want to spend your time?
Yeah, I may be the last person to get this, but I found it so freeing to give myself permission to not read ever single tweet waiting at my Twitter homepage. I also started hitting Mark As Read a lot more often in Google Reader and emptied my To Read folder. This piecemeal approach didn’t seem to cut it, though.
Ultimately it seems like the easiest way to control the flow is at the main valve, not at each individual spigot. Enter Leech Block, a Firefox add-on that limits access to certain websites at particular times of day or after a particular amount of time has passed.
I set Leech Block to limit my web surfing, aside from a few absolutely necessary sites, to an hour and a half a day. That seems short enough to prevent mindless surfing, but long enough to not feel like I’m racing a clock every time I open my browser.
Yes, this method is a bit of a kludge and I don’t see it as a long-term solution to internet overload, but the point is to become more aware of the time I’m spending online and to start using that time more consciously.
I’m committing a week to this experiment and I’ll let you know how it goes. I’m sure I’ll miss some big story on Twitter or in the blogosphere, but who knows? I might actually get more work done.
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