Matt Kiser

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.