Creating a low information diet: less email

An essential enabler for a portfolio life is time. How does one fit more activites in the same amount of time without simply working silly? Efficiency.

Our lives are full of time fillers, things that we just do that don't necessarily create value for us to our addlife quality. Our work lives can be especially inefficient. working in a traditional office environment, think of the time one can spend on admin and office protocols required for you to simply do your primary work.

You cant necessarily change the way an office works, but you can change your information diet.

Technology has brought information into every facet of our lives. There's just so much out there to tune into. If you take it all in you can kiss your day goodbye. Its very easy now to live a reactive life. I know in my experience, I can spend hours a day simply responding to emails... and getting little real work done

Going on a low information diet is not about isolating yourself from the world, its about cutting the fat and being information efficient.

Tim Ferris, author of The 4 Hour Workweek promotes the concepts of lifestyle design and low information diets. One of the key tricks he offers for this is checking your email twice a day and no more. Depending on what you do, responding within a day to a mail is mostly acceptable. So why do we check our mail twenty times a day or have pop up inbox notifications that disrupt our workflow and take us back to being reactive?

Ferris suggestes using an auto reponder like when you go on holiday to let people know that you check your mail twice a day, once at 10:00 and again at 16:00, and that they should call you for anything more urget.

Here is a tutorial on his blog for a low information email diet.