Eliminate Overload and Clutter with a “Low Information Diet”

Posted on 04. Sep, 2009 by Natalie in Entrepreneurs

mail I’m a firm believer in Tim Ferris’ “Low Information Diet” philosophy.

In fact, I’d say it’s downright essential if you want to succeed. And by succeed, I mean see real, tangible results in your business efforts and revenues in record time.

When I finally struck out on my own several years ago to start my own Internet marketing consulting business, I wanted to get my hands on any extra resources I could to help me knock my new business out of the park.

A quick online search revealed hundreds of websites, newsletters, webinars, ebooks, books, magazines and other resources that all promised to school me on how to ramp up my new business.

So basically I opened the floodgates and subscribed to all of them.

In no time, my email inbox was stuffed with at least a hundred messages each morning containing newsletters, promotions, and links. My RSS reader stretched longer than China’s Yangtze River. And my mailbox was soon cram-packed with countless magazines and business books from Amazon.

I noticed I started feeling a ton of pressure to get through all of this information. I realize I put this pressure on myself, but I just felt like if I didn’t read through all of it, I could potentially be missing out on some insight or strategy that would wow my clients or skyrocket my income.

But despite my best efforts, I could never get through it all.

Every day, more information poured in. And the more information that came in, the more unopened emails, magazines, books, and so on were waiting to get gotten to, and the more my stress level increased. And when you’re starting a new business, there’s really no need to add on any additional stress.

That’s when I came across Tim Ferris’ Four Hour Work Week, a very easy read and a must read for every entrepreneur in my opinion.

Inside, Tim promotes the idea of cultivating “selective ignorance” by way of adopting a Low Information Diet to eliminate overload and clutter in your business and in your life.

Creating a Low Information Diet basically consists of scaling right back on:

Web surfing
Excessive email checking
RSS
Television news
Business books, newspapers, magazines, and other non-fiction
And so on

The idea is that, as babies of the Internet age, we’ve basically become information junkies – the more information we get, the more we seek, and the more we seek, the more we attract.

The end result is that we are surrounded by an enormous QUANTITY of information, but not QUALITY information. Any information that would be of actual use becomes buried in an excess of unusable information that bogs us down and steals our energy and mental focus, leaving entrepreneurs like us completely counterproductive and stressed out.

Tim doesn’t advocate completely removing checking email or web surfing from your life altogether, but he does argue for cutting activities like these back significantly so that you become the master of your email and not the other way around, for example.

Tim goes into several strategies in his book on how to apply a Low Information Diet without feeling like you’re completing disconnected from the planet and everyone in your social circle. Implementing just a few of these steps (for example: checking email just twice a day) helped me eliminate a lot of “white noise” from my day-to-day that I feel have made me much more focused and productive.

I’ll let you pick up a copy for yourself to find out more on Tim’s strategies instead of repeating them here.

But I will share with you one of the simplest ways to free yourself from excessive email checking, which most entrepreneurs will agree is a giant time suck.

(Tim actually refers to email as “the largest single interruption in modern life.”)

For the details, check out Tim’s blog post “How to Check Email Twice a Day or Once Every 10 Days”:

http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2007/03/22/how-to-check-e-mail-twice-a-day-or-once-every-10-days/

By simply eliminating most of the information that you allow into your everyday, you’ll free up your time and mental energy to focus on the information that will actually prove to be far more useful to you.

If you’ve already read Tim’s book and have tried some of his Low Information Diet strategies in your own life, I invite you to share your experience with us.

We’d love to hear from you!

No related posts.