If you’ve been following me over on Twitter, you know that occasionally I mention something called The March To Minimalism.
These tweets are my small way of documenting my quest to Throw Stuff Away.
Or, perhaps Give Stuff Away.
Or, even better, Have Less Stuff.
We’ve all heard the adage of “Less Is More”, but these days it’s becoming more and more difficult to figure out just what “less” is, or even what “enough” is, when it comes to our online life.
After reading, reading and re-reading Rolf Dobelli’s white paper on Avoiding News, I’ve been trying to become more conscious about what ‘news’ I consume and I decided to start with the blogs I read and their RSS feeds.
As we know, blogging is a relatively new phenomenon.
The strength is that it gives everyone a voice.
The weakness is that it gives everyone a voice.
There are probably hundreds of thousands of blogs out there; from Live Journal to Blogger to WordPress to MySpace to Facebook, everyone has something to say.
The trap is thinking that you need to listen to every one of those voices.
You, and you alone are the gatekeeper to your mind.
We’ve all heard “you are what you eat” and the old programmers adage “Garbage In, Garbage Out”, but how do you decide just what to eat and what to throw away?
I think that the litmus test should be “Does this positively contribute to my life?”
Do you really get something out of that blog?
Do you learn something?
Does it make you feel good, deep down inside?
Or is it just fluff?
Are they just retweeting something that you read an hour ago?
Is it just gossip, heresay or empty prattling?
Just as we should nourish our body with healthy food, we should nourish our brain with healthy information.
Gossip is not healthy nor necessary.
Keeping up with every gadget is not necessary.
Burying yourself in LOL Cats, shit-throwing political discourse or someone you barely remember from high school’s pictures of her kids is not necessary.
When you’ve been eating junk food, you will feel like shit.
When you go on a diet, and start eating salads and lean protein and fruits, you feel better.
Why not go on a media diet?
Why not get rid of all those blog feeds and see what happens?
I bet right now you’re asking, “How?”
I started by just not logging into my Google Reader.
That’s where all the offending blogs were gathered, so it was quite simple to just go on a crash diet, not log into the Reader and ignore the shit out of them.
It was rough, but I did it.
I got used to not reading all the Gawker Media blogs, full of random shit like gossip, Mac versus PC fan boy arguments and how to Hack your Life by making a wallet out of duct tape.
That did away with about 95% of the blogs that I read.
But I was still a little hungry.
There were a few out there that I missed, that did nourish me, and that I did want to keep up with.
But I didn’t want to fall down that slippery slope of living in my RSS Reader, so I decided to go in a new, gentler direction.
I decided to subscribe to them by email.
To me there is a decided difference between logging into a reader and slogging through blog after blog, entry after entry and opening my Inbox and seeing blog posts there.
- It’s the path of least resistance – I’m going to open my Inbox anyway, right? Right.
- It’s easy to put them aside for later reading – Just because they’re in there, doesn’t mean that I have to read them immediately, right? I have lot of folders or labels in my Gmail and I now have one for “To Be Read”. If that’s too general and vague for you, perhaps that blog post can be put in an existing folder or label. I have labels for “writing”, “marketing”, “finances”, and a few others. With one click I can move that unread blog post into one of those folders, and when I decide to review the emails that are in that folder, it’s there waiting for me. If you really want to get fancy, check out your email’s filters. That’s where you can tell your Inbox to move certain emails to certain folders or labels automatically. For example, I can tell it that for every email that comes in from my girlfriend, I can tell GMail to immediately move it to my label for “dating” without it ever hitting my inbox.
- It’s easy to unsubscribe – Usually at the bottom of each email, there’s a link to unsubscribe. Perhaps you just thought you were hungry for that blog, but after having to wait for a few emails to hit your Inbox, you discover that you don’t crave it as much as you thought. One click – unsubscribe – gone!
- It’s easy to keep or print out for future reference - As I mentioned above, you can put every email that comes into your Inbox into a folder or label it. Maybe you want to keep the information handy. Well, just keep it in that folder or under that label. It’s not going anywhere and you know where it is when you need it. You don’t have to shuffle through your starred posts in your Google Reader trying to find it. If you want it in PDF format, just go to the original blog post (not the email) and use a free converter like JoliPrint to turn that ugly blog post into a PDF of beauty.
William Gibson said that “the information wants to be free”; I would add to that that the information should be useful.
You can decide what is useful.
You can decide how and when to receive that information.
I believe, like Dobelli, that a majority of it is useless.
I believe that the Inbox is a kinder, gentler way to get that information.
Give it a try, won’t you?
