Showing posts tagged fred wilson

How to Silence Information Overload and Unplug from Technology

How to manage information overload

I love technology. It’s an amazing tool. It contributes meaningfully to my life in many ways every single day. But it’s also a slippery slope. It’s easy to get trapped in it. It’s easy to be overwhelmed by it. And, it’s easy to give up on it. And that’s because…

There Is Too Much Information

The New York Times recently posted a story called the Joy of Quiet. It’s a great read, highly recommended, and speaks to this conundrum. Notable quote:

The average American spends at least eight and a half hours a day in front of a screen, Nicholas Carr notes in his eye-opening book “The Shallows,” in part because the number of hours American adults spent online doubled between 2005 and 2009 (and the number of hours spent in front of a TV screen, often simultaneously, is also steadily increasing).

While not surprising, it should give you pause. Eight and a half hours a day. That’s a lot of time spent in front of a screen furiously trying to stay on top of the seemingly never-ending stream of Tweets, Facebook updates, blog posts, news, etc. Like it or not, this contributes to a constant fear of falling behind your digital obligations. And, so we spend more time in front of a screen playing catchup. Kind of an eff’d up cycle, isn’t it?

Similarly, Clay Shirky, a New York University professor, gave a great keynote about this and helped define the problem further, saying ”it’s not information overload. It’s filter failure.”

That’s really why we’re stuck in this cycle. Too much, real-time information is spewing out of every channel. Sometimes you just have to step back from it. I know I have to, from time to time. Which dovetails into another choice quote from the same Times’ piece:

The urgency of slowing down — to find the time and space to think — is nothing new, of course, and wiser souls have always reminded us that the more attention we pay to the moment, the less time and energy we have to place it in some larger context. “Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries,” the French philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote in the 17th century, “and yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries.” He also famously remarked that all of man’s problems come from his inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

It’s not like things are going to get any slower or quieter, anyway. So, what can you do to silence this overload of information and unplug without being caught in the psychological fear of falling behind?

Being Mindful, The Top Idea In Your Head, and Your Subconscious: 

It’s difficult to sit quietly and do nothing. To not check our email. Our Facebook. Twitter. Foursquare. Instagram. G+ (really, nobody has this problem). Flipboard. Text messages. Angry Birds. etc. It’s hard, admittedly. It’s hard to really be still, quiet and unconnected. 

Whenever I’m wildly overwhelmed, I go back to writing my thoughts out by hand — crazy, I know. It’s not a journal, or a diary. It’s not a letter, or an essay. It’s simply an exercise in freestyle concentration. It’s called Morning Pages:

Morning Pages are three pages of longhand, stream of consciousness writing, done first thing in the morning. There is no wrong way to do Morning Pages… more often than not Morning Pages are negative, fragmented, repetitive or bland. Worrying about your job, the laundry, the weird look your friend gave you – all that stuff distracts you from your creativity. It eddies through your subconsciousness and muddies your day. 

Try it for a few days. You’ll find it worthwhile. 

Similarly, Paul Graham from startup incubator Y Combinator has a blog post about the importance of having a top idea in your mind, where he says “it’s hard to do a really good job on anything you don’t think about in the shower.”

I agree with that. If I’m in the shower and thinking about all the things I need to do before leaving my apartment, everything I need to do at work that day, and everything I need to do after work, I get stressed. And, I start wasting time because I’m contemplating everything while standing idle in the shower. It makes my commute suck. My day is shot at that point. 

However, if I think about the one thing that excites me that day, or the one thing that needs to be critically nuanced, I am focused and can go about everything else with a clear head. It’s usually one little dam in your head that’s screwing everything up for you. 

Meanwhile, Fred Wilson from Union Square Ventures echoes Paul’s idea in a great blog post about how he chips away at large problems by tackling them over time, little by little.

…once your brain starts working on a problem, it doesn’t stop. If you get your mind wrapped around a problem with a fair bit of time left to solve it, the brain will solve the problem subconsciously over time and one day you’ll sit down to do some more work on it and the answer will be right in front of you.

This is a very simple approach to simplifying your collective mental clutter. It’s also, essentially, the same approach to what philosophers call being mindful. 

It’s really about practicing a deliberate commitment to doing one thing at a time — aka slowing down. I highly recommend these two Zen Habits blog posts on being mindful, and tips for quieting the mind. 

These four approaches will ground you. They’ll make you feel “lighter” and more capable of accomplishing what you set out to do every single day. In essence, it comes down to distracting your mind, like Pascal said (being mindful and morning pages), and then letting your mind marinate on one thing at a time (top idea in your mind and your subconscious). 

Other Methods

You can try to play games, like phone stacks, which is a collective group unplug for a short duration. Seems like a fun thing to try. I highly recommend going for long walks as a way of clearing the mind. Put the phone away. You don’t need to listen to music during a walk. Or, try using software to disable distractions. Not really a fan of this, though. I think you’d get more out of practicing the ideas above in the long run. 

There’s even a form of slow internet movement that takes a holistic approach to “making an effort to spend more quality time offline, re-thinking relationships on social networks, and finding ways to reduce the feeling of guilt about not checking one’s streams constantly” (via Big Think). Woof. That last bit was kind of heavy, admittedly.

Conclusion

Trying to fight against technology by trying to silence it is the same hopeless fight as trying to remain nostalgic for the “good old days” of vinyl records, muscle cars and “simpler times.” There’s a really interesting quote from David Weinberger, author of the new book  ”Too Big to Know” on Salon.com about this conundrum of too much information:

Ask anybody who is in any of the traditional knowledge fields, and she or he will very likely tell you that the Internet has made them smarter. They couldn’t do their work without it; they’re doing it better than ever before, they know more; they can find more; they can run down dead ends faster than ever before. In the sciences and humanities, it’s hard to find somebody who claims the Internet is making him or her stupid, even among those who claim the Internet is making us stupid. And I believe this is the greatest time in human history.

It’s hard to disagree with that. So maybe we shouldn’t fight ourselves to have a love/hate relationship with technology. Or, to try and unplug as a way of reconnecting to something that we can never actually obtain. But, maybe we should embrace technology fully. Technology is a tool. You need to use the right tool, the right way to achieve the right results. Right now, we’re using a hammer to drill a screw. 

How I Moved My Everything To The Cloud

Moving to cloud-based storage

I hate losing files. I also hate carrying around thumb drives and portable external hard drives. In an age when we’re able to blast humans into space for months at a time, it’s ridiculous to think we can’t keep a friggin’ file from going *poof*. I’ve been lugging a bajillion pound (fact.) Dell laptop around the past five years because I had no clear path to backing up whatever files were contained on it.

So, inspired by VC extraordinaire Fred Wilson’s post on how he moved to the cloud, here’s how I did it and how you can, too. It’s a little scary at first, but trust me, you’ll thank me later. And you won’t lose any files. Keep in mind that successfully migrating to the cloud is about creating a workflow you’re comfortable with. So if these processes don’t work for you, improvise as necessary. 

Step 1: The Tools

You need the right set of tools to make this work. Thankfully these are all free. Go register for accounts with Dropbox, Evernote, Instapaper, cloudHQ and If This Then That. I’ll wait here. 

Ok, good. You’ll probably want to go get yourself a 1Password license as well. And, Google Chrome (taking a leap of faith and assuming you already have a Gmail account…)

Step 2: Getting Setup

Ok, so first things first. Let’s consolidate some data. If you’re like me, you probably have a work and personal computer and have used Safari, Firefox and Chrome throughout the years on each machine. Your data is probably scattered. You’ll want setup Firefox sync and suck all your bookmarks from your other machines over to your current one. Same with Safari (does Safari even have a sync? I have no clue. Use Chrome.). Once your bookmarks and passwords are all sync’d open up Chrome. Go ahead and import bookmarks and passwords from all your browsers into Chrome. The reason we’re using Chrome is that Chrome Sync is superior to Firefox and Safari syncs (again, I have no idea if Safari lets you sync across multiple computers or not. iCloud?) since it brings along extensions to any computer you’re logged into. 

Alright, you will now only use Chrome on all computers. It might take a few hours of idle time for all your bookmarks to populate across browser installs you have on different machines, but once it does you’ll never have an issue with finding bookmarks. You bookmark something at work, and it’s instantly at your home. Magic. 

Setup Dropbox on all your computers. Drag the Instapaper bookmarklet to your Chrome toolbar. Install the Evernote clipper extension. While you’re at it, might as well make a copy of your Google data and put that in Dropbox for safe keeping. 

Step 3: Social

It’s super lovely that we have all these services out there that let you essentially scrapbook your life. It’s super not lovely that they’re scattered across a few different services. Wouldn’t it be nice to collect all those photos in one spot without lifting a finger? Yeah, same here. 

I solved this problem for myself by using If This Then That, a nifty tool that let’s you create triggers to — surprise — do something when something else happens. I created a few tasks that automatically take my Facebook, Foursquare, and Instagram photos and puts them in Dropbox folders with all the metadata and date info still attached. Get the ones I created here:

I also setup a few tasks in IFTTT to take RSS feeds and dump them to Evernote as well. The best example is having my Instapaper items sent as they’re saved to Evernote. Love Instapaper, but having my links saved in Evernote gives me more control over them in the future. You can use IFTTT for just about any service worth it’s salt, so poke around and setup what you need. The goal is to consolidate what you’re doing everywhere else into as few places as possible. 

Step 4: Setup 1Password

I recently got turned onto this nifty app. It stores all your username and password information for all the sites out there, then allows you to retrieve those and autofill using a single password. You can extend this further by storing your credit card and other sensitive information (like address) with it. It takes a leap of faith, but once you’re comfortable with it, you can safely use hard-to-guess passwords on all the sites you visit, and they even have a way for you to access all your information remotely. I’ve setup my account on all computers and devices using this method:

Step 5: Music and Movies/TV 

I love Apple. But I’m not putting my music in their iCloud. I actually use Spotify. However, I’ve sync’d my two iTunes libraries (work and personal) to Google Music. I THEN DELETED MY ENTIRE MUSIC LIBRARY ON ALL COMPUTERS. I’m able to stream this anywhere, anytime. It’s a great companion to Spotify, which already has sync’d up my iTunes libraries. I don’t watch a lot of movies, but if I did I’d probably use some combination of Hulu/Netflix/iTunes paired with AppleTV. The streaming/renting aspect wins out over storing gigabytes of pointless data… Seriously?

UPDATE: I’m giving iTunes Match a try. So far, so good. I revived my libraries via Time Machine and have sync’d both personal and home libraries. I can now grab anything from any device. I imagine I’m going to use iTunes now for the things I care about that are not on Spotify (i.e. fill in the holes with the Adele’s and Black Keys of the world who refuse streaming services). Spotify will remain my chief tool for simply consuming, sharing and discovering music and playlists. I’m thinking Google Music will stay there as a nice backup if I’m neither at a computer with Spotify, or if I’ve lost my iPhone (gasp!). It runs in the background so it’s not much of a concern to me if it’s used, or not. 

Step 6: Putting It All Together

Still with me? Good. So this is how I work… I use Gmail for email and for to-do’s using the Tasks feature. Google Docs for all my writing and spreadsheet needs. I do a one-way sync from Google Docs to my Dropbox using cloudHQ. This makes my docs available on all my devices for quick access. Google Calendar for calendering.

Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/Foursquare keeps me social, and all the photos are saved straight to Dropbox, automatically. I bookmark destinations in Chrome and use Instapaper to save articles for reading later (both on computer and iPhone/iPad), while I clip things I’m researching or collecting information about using the Evernote clipper extension (recipes are great for this sort of thing!). When I can’t use Spotify, I’ll use Google Music.

1Password works on all my devices and keeps me secure. 

I plan to export my Google data once a year. And every month or two I’ll export my Instapaper (I really don’t know why I do that since it’s also saved in Evernote…). I dump this into Dropbox, too. 

I lean on Dropbox pretty heavily. However, just because I have a 150gb hard drive doesn’t mean I need that much Dropbox space. I get by on 50gb. Seriously. Once you remove storing music and movie files from the equation, you open up a ton of possibilities. 

I didn’t discuss them, but I use Basecamp for project management and Google Analytics for, well, analytics. 

There you have it. A pretty straight-forward approach to moving your life to the cloud and having near data ubiquity across all your computers and devices. And, like Fred Wilson said, ”The sense of freedom that exists when you know your applications and files are available from any device with an internet connection and a browser is amazing. I feel lighter already.”

Enjoy.