To begin with, this wasn’t really an experiment. It was actually a month-long punishment that I set for myself for failing to accomplish a goal I’d attempted months ago. Namely that, for the entire month of July, I’m not allowed to use the internet (for browsing, I can use it for keeping JIRA up to date and writing posts like this), play video games, or watch anything that my girlfriend doesn’t watch as well. At least at home. At work I need the internet for my job, so I allowed it there.
The goal of this punishment was two-fold. One, I wanted to really focus on doing something that is more beneficial to my growth as a person than those other things: reading. Two, I wanted to do a trial run of some things I wanted to eliminate that I’d been considering for a while, mostly the internet part. Not much of a punishment overall (though I have been missing my games), but I personally find little value in punishment that doesn’t have a positive effect. The positive effect that I hoped to achieve was to kill my bad habit of surfing the internet/Facebook whenever I couldn’t think of something else to do. And it has worked pretty well.
The Benefits of Elimination
Any productivity expert will tell you that eliminating things is essential to be successful in the important areas of life. The first time it really clicked with me was after reading The 4-Hour Work Week, but it has been reiterated to me time and time again since then. Elimination is getting harder and harder all the time with the advances of our world. Content producers and product makers are figuring out better methods of grabbing our attention. Social networks expand rapidly and notify us of status updates every second. Friends are calling and texting hundreds of times a day to keep in touch or coordinate meetups. As good as these things can be, they are all competing with our time to do things that are potentially more useful.
Obviously, time is the biggest benefit of eliminating the useless things. Every minute you are not spending online or watching TV or playing games is a minute you could be using to learn something or create something of your own. Of course that may not be your goal, but it certainly is mine. I want to leave a mark on the world, and the only way to do that is to create things that other people enjoy or get benefit from. So I definitely want to have as much time to devote to those things as possible.
Another benefit that may surprise people (I certainly was when I heard about it) is that by eliminating useless activities, you are actually helping your brain. Recent scientific research suggests that there is such a thing as bad information, and reading/watching it is actively harmful to your brain. Bad information is a very broad category, but it includes things that either alter your mood in a negative way (mostly things that make you upset or sad) and, to a degree, things that provide nothing to think about (things that are purely for entertainment, aka cat videos). The former is much more destructive than the latter. The internet has become a gigantic cesspool of angst and it is all harmful to you in a very real way. I know most of my friends will say that they enjoy reading comments or posts from people who are “moronic” or “ignorant” because it amuses them. They say it doesn’t upset them. It doesn’t matter, the activity is still harmful, if only from that fact that you are putting other people down, which is a negative attitude. That attitude builds up over time and you get the current state of politics.
On the reverse side, by spending more time on activities that allow you to grow, you become someone who others can admire and depend on. Seriously, you are essentially doubling the benefit to yourself by replacing a bad habit with a good one. Instead of browsing Reddit for a couple hours, you could be learning a new language. It may not immediately come in handy, but when it does, you are going to look like a badass! Instead of sitting on the couch watching a CSI daytime marathon, you could be working on that DIY project that you’ve wanted to do for a while. I guarantee you will feel a lot better about finishing that than realizing you are two hours overdue to make dinner and wondering where the day went.
Choosing What to Eliminate
While I do think that Tim Ferriss’s method of “gun to your head, which one do you choose?” is interesting, it’s not totally necessary. But you do have to do some serious thinking about what you should try to cut back on.
With one exception: the news. I am a very strong advocate that if you eliminate nothing else, you should try avoiding the news at all costs. This is not to say that you cannot still get news from people you know or Facebook/Twitter, but you really should not go out looking for it. If you want to talk about the epitome of bad information, the news is it. Not only is 99% of it completely useless to the average person, the news goes out of its way to be negative at every possible turn. I completely stopped looking at news sites over a year ago, and I couldn’t be happier with that decision. With Facebook and my podcasts I still get the biggest news items, so I’m not completely out of the loop, but it takes up minutes a week to do it that way compared to the hours and hours that most people I know spend. I have heard some people say that not keeping up with the news makes you an ignorant person. Fine by me, you go ahead and keep getting upset over things that you have no control over while I go over here and work on something that I do have control over. Something that makes me happy and will eventually benefit others.
Okay, now that we are all happier people, we can ride on those vibes to even better places. The first place to start looking for things to eliminate is to take inventory of things you do on a regular basis that doesn’t actually give you any enjoyment. This can happen a lot with people because they fall prey to the sunk cost effect. You put a bunch of time into something, but then it stops being fun, but you just keep going with it because you’ve already put so much time into it. To use myself as an example, I’ve read dozens of webcomics and listened to just as many podcasts over the years. With many of them I was able to stop fairly quickly if I didn’t like them, so no real harm done. But then there are others that I read or listened to for years. Eventually one would get to the point where I really didn’t care anymore, but I just kept doing it because I had so much invested in it. You can’t let that control you though. If you really don’t care anymore, you have to let it go. It is hard, but, without exception, I almost immediately forgot about each one once I did finally stop. You won’t miss those things as much as you think you will. If you do end up missing it, you can always go back to it.
The next place I would look is to get rid of things that you will probably never do. That book on your shelf that you got as a gift, but you don’t really have any interest in. That movie that you got 3 years ago on a recommendation, but is still in its shrink wrap. Those 30 games you got during the last Steam sale because they were cheap. That tablet you got, thinking that you would use it on the couch, but you find that you keep thinking of reasons to use it rather than wanting to, so it just sits there on the coffee table. These are all things that I’ve personally dealt with (except the Steam thing, it was more like 10 games). Understand that even if these things are gifts, there is a statute of limitations on how long you have to keep it around before getting rid of it. It’s totally okay to admit that you made a mistake getting something only to realize much later that you’ll never get around to it, or you don’t use it as much as you thought you would. Once you get rid of those things, they will no longer haunt you. Additionally, get rid of things that you don’t intend to ever do again if you have already. Collections don’t impress anyone.
Another step you can take that will make managing things easier is to batch. I explained some of the things I’ve been batching lately a couple weeks ago, and it fully applies here. Look at things that you do regularly (daily or a few times a week), and try to determine if you can possibly batch them together and do them less frequently. For example, I still have a couple webcomics that I like to read, as well as other content that I enjoy. I would read or watch their latest stuff every day they posted something new. For the last few months though, I started batching all of this stuff together into a single block of time that happens once a month. On that one day, I catch up on everything. I don’t miss a single thing (outside of being part of the meta, which I don’t care about anyway for the above reasons), and it takes much less time than it used to.
Once you have done all of those things, then you start going into the really difficult areas of prioritizing the remaining things. At this point they are all things that you enjoy, so it’s going to be a question of deciding which ones you like best, or which ones provide the most benefit. To use myself again as an example, after my experience this month, I am going to have little trouble keeping the internet use down. I find that with each week, I think about getting on the internet less and less, while I think about the things I could be making more and more. The stream of posts these last few weeks are proof of that. And when I reintroduce video games and other media, I’m probably going to be okay with just doing them on the weekends, and to try to keep my activities more varied. I have simply found that I enjoy reading, writing, and learning more than those things. At least for now.
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That’s three weeks in a row! Going to keep trying to post something every Monday, though I imagine coming up with topics will get harder as I go along. Maybe it will be enough to just do status updates more often. We will have to see. Until next Monday.