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Friday, January 25, 2008
Low Information Diet Update
As part of my plan to simplify and eliminate the clutter in my life I decided to go on an info diet a few weeks ago. I dropped dozens of feeds from my reader, dropped almost all internet group memberships, and cancelled almost all internet newsletter subscriptions. By themselves these things made very little change in my day-to-day activities except for vastly reducing my e-mail load, which confirmed that I just didn’t need most of them in the first place.
The second part of the diet is I completely disengaged from the news. I mean completely. I previously just sort of ignored the news but would have the TV on in the background or would read the newspapers delivered to my door each day at the hotel. For some reason I thought I needed to do this to stay current. Well, I don’t. Now I studiously avoid newspapers, talk radio, and the TV with the exception of glancing at frontpage headlines as I walk by news stands (I don’t stop.) Turns out people I know and talk to on a daily basis also read and watch this stuff. And something interesting has happened to our conversations.
Now when they ask, “Did you see so-and-so in the paper/news/airport?” my response is “No, I didn’t. What happened?” They tell me and I get to listen. I actually listen. I’m not busy trying to express my own opinion because I don’t have one. Another nice thing - I can now have small talk, which has always been a problem for me. But now it’s really simple. I can sit down with someone I barely know and ask, “So what’s happening with the elections/industry/stock market/whatever?” And they actually enjoy telling me. Again, I get to listen.
People love it when you listen to them. It’s not like I didn’t know this, but giving myself the opportunity to practice it via my info diet has been really interesting. My ego no longer sits in the shadows going “Speak up! Speak up! You know that!” – competing with my desire to listen. And I don’t feel the least bit stupid because I have no idea where Britney Spears was last night. In fact, I feel better because I don’t know.
Update on Outsourcing
I've been in a string of cheap hotels and crowded, delayed airplanes since Sunday night with little time or energy for working on the computer. I'm still recovering from some Zombie Death version of the flu that kept me home all last week and really screwed up my schedule. But things are on the upswing now.My new Virtual Assistant is Tina with Get Friday. Last week I assigned Tina her first task - find me a temporary office worker who can come to my office and clean, sort, and file nearly two years worth of back mail including all my bank and credit card statements. This isn't as bad as it sounds, as I'm an independent operator with an individual's load of mail. It's not as if there is a container-load of mail for some corporation. Still, it's significant. I'm terrible at organizing my own back office stuff. I'm great at organizing what I get paid to do, just not the stuff that I don't want to do. So it piles up and interferes with my ability to do tax returns and such. That's bad.
I've been trying to solve this problem with various accounting and office support things for over five years, including stints with two separate small business bookkeeping services. It's one of the two greatest burdens in my life and weighs on me constantly that I can't stay on top of my papers and finances and taxes and such. There have been times when I got caught up, but I never solved the problem and a year or two later I'm in the same situation again. It's the proverbial recurring nightmare.
So the first task I assigned Tina was to contact temporary agencies and see if they could provide someone to come in and clean up the backlog and prepare the statements for scanning. As a secondary requirement I wanted someone who could do the scanning if I provided the tools. I gave Tina a list of three local services and all pertinent details about the work. I instructed her to start with the three locals and spread out into greater Atlanta if needed.
Over the course of two days Tina contacted a dozen different agencies in the greater Atlanta area and gave me a spreadsheet with all the data about who, when, what, where. In almost every case she got voicemail or some other sort of delay/barrier/put-off - mostly voice mail. That alone would have stopped me cold. Three voicemail responses in a row from businesses that are supposed to be in the support business would have pissed me off to the point I would have dropped the whole exercise. I don't have two days to deal with fucking voice mail for something like this when all I'm doing is a basic inquiry to determine if my request is even feasible. But this took Tina a total of about two hours over two days.
Wed-Thu of this week some of the agencies began to return Tina's calls and contacts and she forwarded them to me to ask how to proceed. So I had her give the agencies the details again, and tell them that they could contact me directly if they were prepared to directly answer my three basic questions:
- Can you offer someone to meet the stated requirements?
- Can you meet the timeframe?
- What are typical rates for such work?
That's all I wanted to know.
So yesterday afternoon I got a call from a nice young lady with an office service just a few miles from my home. She asked me a couple of pertinent questions about the work and my situation, offered a couple of alternative service scenarios, and told the the costs/advantages of each. She was very helpful and very informative. I think she can solve my problem - at least this part of it. And I would never have known about her if Tina hadn't gone through the exercise of contacting all the agencies. We have an appointment to meet next Thursday when I am home to interview and see if I want to hire them.
It's too early to judge the overall success of Tina and Get Friday, but this first task result shows great promise. For $25 I avoided all the hassle of dealing with phone tag and I found a new (potential) source of office help. Fantastic.
Terry Frazier at 8:45 AM
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Tuesday, January 15, 2008
Joining a Diet Club
My friend Matt has been following my low information diet plans. Today he announced that he reduced his RSS feeds to the point he could read them all in 20 minutes.Congratulations, Matt. I have gotten mine to the point they can be read in 5-10 minutes, no more than 20 even if I wait a week. I continue to prune the e-mails by watching for new, low-activity lists as time passes. I don't feel like I'm missing a thing.
I do find myself looking for some sort of fidget activity to take the place of checking e-mail or RSS. I have to stop myself. I also have to make sure that I'm not arbitrarily wasting time on making blog posts, substituting one fidget for another. But I want to chronicle my progress in case it is of value to me or others later on. I will limit this to no more than 1 post per day and no more than 3 per week. That should be plenty.
Terry Frazier at 3:34 PM
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Sunday, January 13, 2008
The Low Information Diet
Hi. I’m Terry Frazier and I am an information junkie.
One of the principles of Tim Ferris’ 4–hour Workweek is the low information diet. Ferris’ opinion is that success requires massive output – massive action – rather than the constant intake of information. Information that is not immediately useful is nothing more than a distraction. And distractions equal low output.
I don’t know about you, but I am easily distracted. I use this distraction to procrastinate – to avoid the things I ought to be doing but don’t want to do. I cannot count the times in a week that I check e-mail “just one more time” as an excuse to avoid doing something else. The same can be said for reading the RSS feeds in my reader, perusing newsgroups, etc.
Sure, I am up on all the latest chit-chat and brainstorming and minutiae, but very little (most often none) of that contributes to my completing a given task. It usually just sucks time away. So I work longer hours to get the important stuff done. I sit at the computer for hours, typically squeezing in 10–12 hours of time even though I am only billing for 8 (at the most.) Add in phone calls, sorting through spam, and the recalibration time I lose every time I leave a project and go back to it and it could easily add up to an extra day or three per month. I do get an occasional chuckle, or learn some tidbit that is helpful, but nowhere near enough to justify the time.
This is, in a word, stupid.
For the past few days I have been revamping my info-diet. I have unsubscribed from dozens of mail lists that I no longer read. I have dropped out of all but a handful of internet groups, leaving only those that are immediately applicable to a current project. I have reduced the number of feeds in my reader from 97 to 11 – the very few people who I actually know in some way plus two sites that are applicable to a current project.
I have long ago given up watching the news or reading newspapers or news magazines – if there is a serious need I can buy a back issue. I don’t care about the elections. Any candidate the Democrats pick will be a nut-case. And I will intensely dislike whoever the Republicans pick.
That’s the easy stuff. The hard part is stopping myself from watching TV and reading stuff that doesn’t matter. I have hundreds of books. They sit on shelves, calling to me. I want to read them. But most of them don’t make me more productive or effective.
As a practical matter, Ferris suggests checking e-mail and voice mail 2x per day – at noon and 4pm – responding to it and being done.
Ferris is not the first to suggest this. I have read a dozen “productivity” books on time management, getting things done, project management, organization, etc. None of them helped. This is the first time its really sunk in that I should just stop all of it. Just stop.
There are still tasks that must be done that I don’t want to do. This is where outsourcing comes in. I’m working on that. But at the same time I’m going to lose about 20 lbs of excess information fat. I’m going to stop watching my “favorite” TV shows – there aren’t that many and they aren’t any good after one season anyway. But it’s going to be tough eating breakfast without Mike & Mike in the Morning. And leaving the TV off during all that hotel room time I have every week will be tough. But I’m a man. I can change. If I have to. I guess.
Terry Frazier at 4:29 PM
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