I just did a one-week media/information fast, and the experience was way more fruitful than I was expecting so I thought I'd share what I learned.
Here's the video: https://youtu.be/axZn_RSYlnA
What is it? No podcasts, audio books, regular books, news sites, newspapers, TV, radio, or music for one week. I only did email and SMS/Whatsapp.
Why do it? It sometimes feels like I live with earbuds in my ears. I wanted to gain some perspective on my habits. And it seemed like a fun experiment / pattern interrupt.
Expectations: I was expecting to be bored, and that's about it.
What did it do?
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It greatly improved my sleep, at least for the first three nights. I went from very broken / poor sleep to solid 9-hour nights. Very unusual for me. I think mostly because of the digital sunset effect (reduced screen time at night). As a result, my mood and workouts were way better.
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I learned it's easy to conflate consumption with production / rationalize that you did a lot during the day, even if a lot of that was just consumption (of seemingly useful non-fiction books, say). When you cut out consumption, production is your only criterion for progress so you can't fool yourself.
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I realized that a lot of my consumption is really pretty mindless, even though I make a real effort to seek out good material. It inspired me to broaden my sources.
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Music (and media) has a drug-like effect, which is reduced with chronic consumption. Once/week could be a nice change; would make it special and more deeply enjoyable.
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Chronic consumption of "motivational" non-fiction content is largely a waste of time. If you're a chronic consumer, ask to what extent it leads to action.
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It put me in the mood for austerity and more experiments like this.
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Did it make me more productive? Not sure. However, half-way through I started working on a very interesting project, and it was obvious that productivity is not so much an issue of cutting out media, but more about how inspired you are to do whatever it is you're doing. So my extra time / energy didn't automatically go into my work.
Submitted June 19, 2017 at 07:18PM by rationalawareness http://ift.tt/2sQoW3q
