JoshCheney.com

For those of you who missed the memo, I will be visiting Rochester November 10th through the 12th, and I will be bringing my fiancee, Alex, with me. My cell phone number is still the same, and I can be reached until then via email or this site (joshcheney.com), if you wanted to get in touch with me.

Note: This was last year.

First off, I realized after a while that it was kind of ironic that I was feeding other people's information additions with tales from my information fast. Hence the lack of of posting since it began.

That aside, I fell in love with a low-information diet. I got a whole lot more done in the course of a day, and as the book predicted, the world did in fact go on without me reading or hearing about it every 5 minutes.

The first step for me in my information fast was to change my default home page from the information-rich iGoogle page I have built to the less cluttered default Firefox home page, consisting of a Google search box. While I am sure that doing this has helped my productivity immensely, there are still moments when I tempted to just check Google Reader, just once.

The other hard part has been my mailing lists. I subscribe to four or five pretty high volume lists, and it was difficult to not read any of the messages getting dumped into my lists folder in Thunderbird. What I ended up having to do was turn off the little pop-up notifications, and after doing that, the major prompt to read those messages went away.

And the twitching isn't too bad, I just can't have open containers of liquid in my hand.

While I was walking through a random store with my family over the weekend, I happened to pick up a book by Timothy Ferriss called "The 4-Hour Workweek". While there were some parts of it that seemed a little far fetched to me, the chapter titled the "Low Information Diet" stuck a chord with me. My life revolves heavily around information, the question being rather or not I need it.

There is a section at the end of every chapter titled 'Questions and Actions' in which Ferriss lists out questions to ask yourself or activities to reinforce what he has talked about in that particular chapter. In the Q&A for the "Low Information Diet", he proposes a five day media fast.


The world doesn't even hiccup, much less end, when you cut the information umbilical cord. To realize this, it's best to use the Band-Aid approach and do it quickly: a one-week media fast.
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Beginning tomorrow and for at least five full days, here are the rules:
No newspapers, magazines, audiobooks, or nonmusic radio. Music is permitted at all time.
No news websites whatsoever (cnn.com, drudgereport.com, msn.com, etc).
No television at all, except for one hour of pleasure viewing each evening.
No reading books, except for this book and one hour of fiction pleasure reading prior to bed.
No web surfing at the desk unless it is necessary to complete a work task for that day. Necessary means necessary, not nice to have.