Fighting my Internet Addiction

As I talked about yesterday, I recently decided to break a bad habit of spending hours reading political blogs. As this started to reveal to me the incredible amount of time I've been wasting online, I started working on trimming back other sources of unnecessary time.

Email

I've never had good email hygiene. In fact, when I looked at my inbox yesterday morning I had 7153 unread messages. Most of those email messages I had skimmed the title, felt it was not worth my time, and let it drift back into the ether of my inbox, buried by incoming mail, while some smaller but still significant portion I missed completely and have never seen. I'd spent some time a few months ago creating filters to reduce the amount of stuff coming straight to my inbox, and have been mostly keeping up since, but in general it was still a mess.

Today my inbox looks like this:

I declared email bankruptcy. Conceding that I would never go through all of those emails, I glanced through the first page to make sure I didn't have any pending responses, and then archived everything. Luckily, since it's Gmail, they're still all searchable so if I need anything I'll be able to find it. I've also been going through and systematically unsubscribing to email lists that I don't get much value from.

What I didn't realize was how big of a difference having an empty inbox would make in the feel of checking email. It not only makes email seem less frantic and cluttered, but it makes it way easier to check quickly if there is anything new, and then go away again if there isn't. I don't know why, but it also seems to make the act of looking at and processing every incoming email immediately easier as well.

RSS Feeds

I've also been going through and removing some of the RSS feeds that I've gotten behind on. Certainly not all of them; there are feeds that I'm behind on that I love to read, and would by no means stop following. The criterion has become: Does the idea of reading all of these posts excite me or discourage me? If the answer is discourage, I'm getting past my aversion to getting rid of things and stopping following them.

Upshot

Reducing the amount of time I need to keep up with my life online is really important for my trip to Guatemala, because we're not bringing laptops and will be completely dependent on Internet cafes for online access. Since I'm planning on trying to maintain this blog at roughly a post a day throughout that time, any extra time I can trim away is extremely valuable.

Longer term, I think that this sort of adjustment will be tremendously beneficial for my personal productivity and wellbeing. This morning, when I got up, I took 10 minutes to check my email and all of my RSS feeds. That process (when including the political blogs that I'm in the process of kicking entirely) used to take between 30 minutes and an hour! Since I do this roughly twice a day, and adding in all of the small time savings when checking email, no longer flipping to political blogs, etc, I'm saving somewhere between 2 and 3 hours of time a day!

This morning, this was actually a little uncomfortable! I had a moment of feeling something like "That's it? What do I do now?", but after a few minutes of unease I realized that this was now almost an entire hour extra that I could use for writing, thinking, meditating, or exercising at the beginning of my day. In other words, things that are actually productive rather than passive intakes of information. As my friend Brad recently wrote: Consume Less, Learn More, Create Most.

I'm not confident in my ability to stick to this reduced-information-consumption diet; as I mentioned, it's actually a pretty uncomfortable adjustment. Hopefully the shock therapy of having 3 months in Guatemala without an at-home internet connection will help me form the habit, and the increased productivity and free time will give me plenty of motivation to learn to adjust.

Liked this? Looking for more like this? You might like

• Nine Ideas for Breaking Bad Habits
• KBall's First Law of Simplicity

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KBall's Second Law of Simplicity

Have you ever spent hours agonizing over which airplane ticket to buy, only to find when you finally decide that your first choice costs $100 more than when you started? How about spending days planning out exactly how you were going to explain yourself over the phone only to rediscover that sales reps don't need much explanation to sell you their product?

The first one is my wife; the second one is me. We each have our neuroses and places where we over-optimize, and thinking about them has led me to propose KBall's Second Law of Simplicity:

Good enough now is almost always better than perfect eventually.

Sometimes known as satisficing, this law indicates that in most circumstances, you're better off taking the first result that is good enough, instead of exhaustively trying to find the best answer. Instead of trying to perfectly optimize your layover while minimizing your cost, figure out the bounds of your comfort, and buy the first tickets that satisfy those restraints.

Caveats
The inclusion of 'almost always' in the law probably clued you in that there are caveats.

1. Some things it really matters to get right.
When we were planning our wedding, we spent forever working on our wedding vows and trying to find the right readings. Those decisions were core to what we wanted out of our wedding, and coming back to them day after day was worth it. On the other hand, for decisions like which event rental company to use, where to hold the pre-wedding party, and what the text of the invitations would be, all that mattered was that the result was 'good enough'.
2. Watch out for interactions with the first law.
If you're buying stuff for your home, following the second law can lead to a build up of extra junk, because its simpler to buy another bookcase than to figure out which books you really need. The second law is most useful for things that are transitory, like airplane tickets, rather than things that are going to be more durable and lasting. In building a product, the same holds true. Some parts will be core to your product vision for years to come, while others cease to be important by the next meeting. Often, it's hard to tell in advance which is which. My rule of thumb is that unless you know something is going to be mission critical, build it first as simply as possible (satisficing), if comes up again try to make it a bit better, and on the third time take the time to rework it into a fully optimized and general solution.

Like the first law of simplicity, this is not something to follow unthinkingly, but rather a good thing to keep in mind against our natural tendency to over optimize.

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KBall's First Law of Simplicity

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KBall's First Law of Simplicity

There's an asymmetry between simplicity and complexity. Simplicity seems easy, its straightforward to comprehend and interact with, but its devilishly hard to create. Complexity on the other hand, is hard, intimidating, and bogs you down to interact with. However, its incredibly easy to add to any process. Can't decide between feature a and feature b? Build both! That should resolve the problem... and yet... somehow the resulting product is worse than it was before, because it is more complex and harder to understand.

This happens in everyday life as well. Packing stuff up to move has made it abundantly clear to me; stuff just kind of accumulates. Its wayyyy easier for me to buy a new book than to donate an old one (I might want to read it again!), and the same goes for clothing, gadgets, and a variety of other household items. Before you know it, you're bogged down in stuff and doing things like moving or packing up to go to Guatemala for 3 months are downright intimidating.

This leads me to posit a rule which seems to apply to just about anything related to human behavior. KBall's First Law of Simplicity:

Without outside influence, things always get more complex.

Though the text of the law has no mention of simplicity, I named it as I did because I'm much more interested in how to make things simple than how to make them complex, and it has major implications for simplicity. If things naturally tend towards complexity, that means that not only is creating simplicity something that requires effort, but maintaining it is as well!

When structuring your home, or considering a purchase, the idea of maintaining simplicity should be an active part of the decision making process. When making a life decision about what to study, where to live, or how to travel, simplicity should be something that is assigned a value and used when measuring tradeofs.

Similarly, within a business organization, an advocate for simplicity is a crucial piece of the product making process. Such advocation is likely to be difficult: Its an unpopular position to advocate for cutting features, or not building them in the first place. However, without such a balance the first law will assert itself and the product will gradually come to resemble a hydra: multiheaded, difficult to maintain, and intimidating to those crucial new users/customers you are trying to attract.