Tim's information diet for a clut­ter free 2010

An excellent piece from Tim de Jardine, technology entrepreneur :

We are all flooded by infor­ma­tion.  Hourly we may check Twit­ter updates, Linkedin, Face­book and RSS sub­scrip­tions.  Until a few weeks ago I was using too many appli­ca­tions to accom­plish this and espe­cially in 2009 I was expe­ri­enc­ing infor­ma­tion over­load.  I even deleted my Twit­ter account a few times.  Here's what I was pre­vi­ously using:

Google Reader (iPhone Net­NewsWire), Linkedin, Face­book, Hoot­suite (iPhone) Tweetie (Mac).

Today I use an sin­gle iPhone app, it's a smart social and RSS reader.

The smart social & RSS reader will save you time, it will elim­i­nate infor­ma­tion over­load. It knows what you want to read  based on pre­vi­ous choices and can guess what you are going to read.  It rec­om­mends arti­cles and is right almost all the time.  You can delete arti­cles from rec­om­men­da­tions to improve the algo­rithm.  The more you use the app, the bet­ter it gets.

Part of using an app like this is giv­ing up con­trol.  Many of us use social media or “work for works sake” to fill in time in our lives.  We often use it to feel busy.  Here's a wake up call.  Its not a life. If you Tweet >10 times a day and spend >1hr total time on Twit­ter, take a look at your­self.  Is this the life you want to be liv­ing? Or are you just wast­ing your life?

Below is a step by step guide to stream­line your infor­ma­tion diet.

1. Can­cel all email noti­fi­ca­tions from Twit­ter, Face­book, Linkedin except Friend requests on Face­book and con­nec­tion requests on Linkedin.  These emails are noise and your inbox is already cluttered


2. Delete Face­book & any Twit­ter clients from your iPhone.  Too tempt­ing to jump in (no work for works sake!)


3. Remove all appli­ca­tions on your PC/Mac that stream Twit­ter, Face­book or Linkedin and remove all noti­fi­ca­tions ser­vices that popup in your face.


4. Sched­ule time peri­ods to con­sume infor­ma­tion.  I sug­gest 15 min­utes a day to catch up on Twit­ter, Face­book, Linkedin & News.  No more.  This stuff clut­ters your mind and you may have some with­drawal symp­toms for a day or so begin­ning this pro­gramme.  My advice is to stick with it.  Much like watch­ing TV you wont miss it after a few days and your mind will be much clearer.


5. Down­load and install the 1 app you need for RSS/Twitter/Linkedin/Facebook My6Sense (iTunes link)


6. If you must Tweet from your iPhone install a Twit­ter client that only lets you send mes­sages and not read them.  An exam­ple may be Fast Tweet or Sim­pleTwit I use UP.  Do not use a Twit­ter client where you can read tweets.  Too much temptation.

My6Sense the smart RSS & social reader.

my6sense is a social reader that lets you read and share rel­e­vant infor­ma­tion from your social and RSS feeds.  It does this by rec­om­mend­ing the best Tweets, Arti­cles and Social Events based on your pre­vi­ous behav­iour with the app.  my6sense gath­ers evi­dence ofwhat you like and pre­dicts what you will like in the future.  It will end the clut­ter and cut down your infor­ma­tion diet.

Not con­vinced?  They have a handy fea­ture in the app where you can look at the stream of con­tent as it would be if you wer­en't using this app (the Time tab), that alone is handy as it dis­plays every­thing in one screen.  Look at this then switch to the rec­om­mended tab.  I have “checked” the results sev­eral times due to with­drawal and they were very accurate.

my6sense is Free, so go and try it out now! Heres to a clut­ter free 2010.

So very well put! Thank you Tim :-) See the original post here.