We All Need An Information Diet
Internet, besides vegan burritos and kombucha, is one of the greatest inventions of our times. However, as with vegan burritos — eating too many of them will make you fat — spending too much time on the internet will make your brain fat. Fortunately, preventing brain obesity is not too hard because we have some pretty effective ways to deal with information overload. Let's get on a low-carb internet diet!
Disclaimer: This article contains explicit language and possibly bad advice.
Notifications
Just kill them. Your friend has joined Instagram. Who gives a fuck? Happy birthday, Martin! Shit, am I so old? You have 20% off of your next delivery. Fuck off, I want to pay the full price. The only notifications I keep on are payment notifications and direct messages from friends.
- Open your phone settings and find notifications section. Go through all the installed apps and turn off their notifications unless they're somehow important. You can disable app notifications on a per-category basis — for example, disable all Facebook notifications except for event cancelation.
Emails
Internet companies like to send emails to their customers to keep them hooked to their products, but we are not interested in their promotions and discounts.
- Review all emails you received in the past week and unsubscribe from every newsletter that doesn't bring value to your life.
- Setup filters to label emails and move them out of inbox. You don't need to scatter your attention and deal with the labeled emails immediately. For example, you can batch read all the newsletters once a week.
Social Networks
Facebook, Instagram, Twitter— they're all free services, but we know that nothing in life is for free. Social networks are designed to keep our attention and sell it to advertisers. Did you really need to know what your friend's cat had for breakfast? I only follow people who I'm genuinely interested in, who post valuable content or photos in leggings.
- Unfollow all friends who don't post content that has some value for you. Facebook has even a tool to review friends visible in the newsfeed.
- Check social networks no more than once a day so that your attention doesn’t get weakened and you can focus on all the beautiful things in life.
- Schedule a day free of social networks. Start slowly with one no social networks day per week and then gradually extend to multiple days.
- You can use screen time settings of your phone to enforce these limits.
News
Media companies are incentivized to produce loads of (manure) articles every day to attract visitors and maximize ad revenue.
- Unfollow news sites on social networks to minimize your exposure to clickbait headlines. They're carefully crafted to make you open them, spend time on their site and hopefully click on some ads.
- If you read the news daily, your head is going to be constantly full of the world's problems. Ignore them! Set a time apart once a week to go through all the headlines and only open the truly interesting ones.
- Support your favorite sites directly by paying for subscriptions. Otherwise they'll get support from the advertisers who want to sell you products.
More Tips
Social networks and news contain so much (smelly) useless information that we could call them fast carbs of the internet. Limiting these calories will almost get our brain to its dream curves, but I've got a few more tips to share.
- Unfollow all YouTube channels you no longer watch or that don't produce any valuable content (especially the ones posting clickbait videos).
- I read over 100 books a year. Wait, what? Yeah, there're podcasts that summarize entire books in 10–20 minutes. My favorite source of distilled wisdom is Blinkist. Obviously, it's not the same as reading a book, but summaries can give you the main points fast and then, if they pique your interest and you have enough time, you can read the book.
That's it for today. Have you found my tips useful or should I keep them to myself next time? What do you do to cut the noise on the internet? Please let me know in the comments and stay healthy!
