Jun
17
June 17, 2010 | 2 Comments
I fell down a very deep blogger’s rabbit hole this morning. Beware of well-curated lists of “Bests” such as “Best Blogs for Writers” from WordCount). I eventually found myself looking on Amazon at a book called:
 The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich by Timothy Ferriss
The title says it all, but what struck me best in the book’s description was this bullet point:
 • How to cultivate selective ignorance—and create time—with a low-information diet
Hail Mary! Isn’t this exactly the antidote I need right now as my head aches from speed reading 14 blogs on how to drive traffic and generate comments on this very blog that you are (hopefully) reading right now? I think that I am suffering, as I think many of us are, with information overload on a massive mind-numbing scale (see: Digital Fidgeting). Here I am trying to maximize my skills as a blogger by diving into an information ocean so large that the very concept of blogging kind of just ceased to exist for me today. If there is so much information that I cannot possibly soak it all in, then, well, eff it all. My brain turned off and now all I can think about is getting an ice cream cone later with my three-year-old and sitting in the park with her discussing the clouds.
Selective Ignorance. It’s an important new human adaption that we should all try to cultivate in order to reproduce and insure our DNA’s continued existence in the actual non-virtual world. (I just corrected a typo…In the line above I had typed “eproduce” instead of “reproduce” – sigh.)
I think that Marla Beck, LiveWires’ official Life Coach for Writers, would agree that information overload is not that productive. She states in a recent post on her blog “The Relaxed Writer” that in order for writers (and all humans alike, right?) to be productive and creative and to refresh our brains rather than fry them in hot bubbling eStimulation, sometimes we just need to “go someplace gorgeous“…
Step away from the computer.
Let’s go.
Comments
I’m not sure whether to thank you or apologize. Either way, I’m glad you found me, because it made me find you.
And I love that this site is called LiveWires. A long time ago, at least in Internet years, I wrote a column for Reuters about the Internet – back when editors thought one column a week about the Internet was enough. It was called Livewire.
Michelle Rafter
[...] week’s post How to Start Your Low-Information Diet touched on the subject of Tuning Out. Here’s a bit more on [...]