Cutting out the techno carbs

For the past several months, I’ve been on a high-tech diet. The problem started innocently enough with a minor PDA addiction. I’d randomly check work email in the evenings, on the weekends and even during my commute. Then, with Facebook and Twitter, the socnets took over. And being the news junkie that I am, I was always reading something in between the two.
Like many, I reveled in the always on, always connected, mentality. But I had hit the point where constant connectivity was overwhelming and it actually became counterproductive. Don’t get me wrong, I was always organized (and I rarely have a scroll bar in my inbox). But finding the time to read, digest and file all the content was becoming too cumbersome.
And thus, my high-tech diet journey began with these steps:
I cut out the junk mail: This was the first, easiest and most obvious step. Rather than delete annoying emails (in both my work and personal accounts), I actually started unsubscribing. Within a week, the clutter was clear.
I re-prioritized my RSS feed reader: I’ve used Bloglines since it launched, and I love it. I have dozens of folders (when I was at an agency the folders mapped to my clients), and each folder has its own email address. During step #1, I adjusted my newsletter subscriptions to go directly into my reader. Same for non-essential Google Alerts (and while I was at it, I turned those into daily emails vs. getting them “as it happens”). This made it a lot easier to be off email for extended periods of time without my inbox going out of control and helped me focus.
I trimmed the feeds I subscribe to: Over the years, I’ve added hundreds of RSS feeds. Some have become redundant, and others just didn’t interest me anymore. For several weeks, each Friday I focused on a specific folder and I deleting feeds. I found I had subscribed to a lot of pundit type blogs that quite honestly were of no interest to me. Those were the first to go.
I created my own socnet boundary: A major challenge with social networks, for me at least, is the overlap of work and personal life (Check out this piece on how/why to keep them separate). It was abundantly clear that I needed to create a boundary and stick to it. I decided that LinkedIn would be my professional contact management system (i.e. address book). I was up to 800 contacts, and I cut it to just under 300 people who were relevant to my career, and who I actually knew. On Facebook, I’ve been working to make it my personal network. At first, I felt guilty un-friending people, but once I got over that, I transitioned professional contacts to LinkedIn. Now, if a professional contact sends me a friend request I simply respond with a Linkedin invite and explanation. I still have a gray area of coworkers that overlap the two, but I think I’ve found a workable balance. Ultimately this made both networks more useful to me and has eliminated a lot of unnecessary emails.
I re-evaluated my Twitter stream: I fought Twitter initially, but over the past year I’ve found it incredibly valuable. Initially, I did what most marketing people do, and I followed all the thought leaders. Over time, though, I’ve trimmed my stream to about 100 people. For me, that’s the sweet spot for me to follow the various conversations. Too many more, and I can’t keep up with the conversation. Too few, and it becomes stale. At that level, it’s also much easier for me to log off on the weekends.
Finally, I mapped content, updates and notifications to my preferred medium: Trimming my feeds and streams were helpful, and I found I was able to digest more information in less time, but I still wanted to optimize my productivity. The final step for me was to eliminate redundancies and make sure I received valuable content in the best format for my work habits. For example, I loved following Laura Fitton (@Pistachio) on Twitter, but the volume of her tweets were drowning out other voices in my stream. So I un-followed her and instead signed up for her blog. At the same time, a handful of bloggers always link to new posts on Twitter. I un-subscribed to their blogs and read the posts as I see them on Twitter. I’m still getting the same content, but in the format that I prefer. And I’m only being notified once when something new appears.
It took awhile to figure out what I could and couldn’t live without, and how I preferred to digest different types of content. But now, I find it easy to stay on top of things, and when I have on a socnet or reading my feeds, it’s a lot easier for me to focus. In some areas, I trimmed enough that I was able to add new contacts and sources, which has been great. And, in the midst of all of this, I’ve found more time for offline networking and reading, which has been great.
How about you? Are you in control of your high-tech diet, or is it in control of you?




