Lately I’ve been having an allergic reaction to the internet. More and more I feel less and less. I’ve been noticing a trend with me: I’ll start doing something, get sidetracked and go down a rabbit hole of information, only 15 minutes later to remember to do what I had set out for initially.
For example, in thinking about writing this post, I planned to link to a post by Tantek that I found in the comment thread of yet another post by Zeldman. So I open my homepage (iGoogle page filled with feeds), and see that he just posted a new entry and proceed to read it. I finish. “Ok, right,” wanted to find the link to Tantek’s email reduction post. Find it. Go there. Briefly skim it. See something about filtering. Go to my Gmail account to set up a few filters for emails that I don’t want to unsubscribe (like my bank statements), but don’t want to see in my inbox either. Finish with that. Open my site. Remember that I want to turn off the del.icio.us links that get automatically posted. Do that. And only then do I finally sit down to write this (and I catch up with myself right… here).
This has been happening to me more and more recently, constantly getting sidetracked, and sidetracking from the sidetrack, looping over and over through heaps of information related by nothing more than a link, a bare thread stitching the web together. At work it’s very similar, and I see the same problems with others: Outlook is popping up, demanding at least part of my attention to process what email just arrived in your inbox (I’m usually inclined to open it right away), followed by an IM from someone with a question about something, getting back to doing some actual work, getting another email requiring immediate and more intense attention, until I get back to what I was doing originally, when someone stops by the cubicle to have a chat. And then it’s time for another meeting.
I’m experiencing precisely what Kathy Sierra wrote about almost a year ago to the day: The Asymptotic Twitter Curve. The constant interruptions are keeping me from getting into a state of flow:
Worst of all, this onslaught is keeping us from doing the one thing that makes most of us the happiest… being in flow. Flow requires a depth of thinking and a focus of attention that all that context-switching prevents. Flow requires a challenging use of our knowledge and skills, and that’s quite different from mindless tasks we can multitask (eating and watching tv, etc.) Flow means we need a certain amount of time to load our knowledge and skills into our brain RAM. And the more big or small interruptions we have, the less likely we are to ever get there.
A year later, Scott Karp writes in Why I Stopped Using Twitter:
But the noise to signal ratio is WAY too high. And the temptation to Tweet for the sake of Tweeting is WAY too high.
Granted both of these examples single out Twitter (which I just can’t get into), but I feel that it’s a larger problem, a problem of being too connected. Which brings me again to Tantek’s email reduction post.
He lists a number of ways to reduce the size of your inbox traffic, but I am now experimenting with a much simpler goal: reduce emails to personal emails (for my personal email account anyway). That means absolutely no auto-generated emails, even to notify me that someone sent me a message via MySpace of FaceBook. If they were really my friend, they’d send me an email, and the message can thus wait till I get around to checking back in. No newsletters of any type. I find that while they may initially be interesting, they become oppressive after a while. Get rid of them, they won’t be missed. There will be exceptions, of course; I’d rather get my banking statements via email than snail mail. When I buy something online I’d like to keep the receipt. But for these exceptions filtering and archiving them immediately will provide me later access without unduly begging for my attention.
I think the defining factor between the kind of information that I want to have pushed vs. pulled is the audience of that information. If I or a very small group I belong to is the intended audience, I’d like to get an email (have the information pushed to me). On the other hand, if the audience is very broad and there’s no real personal relationship (and by that I mean, I’ve actually met the person), then by all means make the information available, but don’t beg for my attention. Feeds are a great way to accomplish this. It’s easy to set up a page pulling the latest information from whatever information sources I’m interested in, and I remain in control of when and where I consume said information.
It’s all about unconnecting so you can be more connected. What I mean is that by being tuned in all the time you’re not really tuned in to anything at all; paying shallow attention to many things you gain no deep understanding of a particular topic. When I was younger I could sit down and draw for hours. The time would just fly by and I wouldn’t notice. I was in a state of flow. Nowadays it’s hard to get into a prolonged period of concentrated attention.
Maybe the real challenge is to try to leverage technology in ways that don’t waste time creating white noise but to aid in creating a state of flow. To quote Kathy again: “this onslaught is keeping us from doing the one thing that makes most of us the happiest… being in flow.”
That’s what it should be all about: happiness.
