Consider for the moment one of the great energy drainers of the twenty-first century: information overload.
Now think for a moment about what you might do about it.
The answer is quite a lot, actually. And it start with a disconnect vocation.
These days we’re deluged with information, coming at us from every possible angle. It’s relentless: emails, RSS feeds, blogs, social networking sites, YouTube, televisions, magazines, newspapers, memos, DVDs, radio, fax machines, BlackBerrries, satellite radio – it’s exhausting just listing the sources, let alone reading or listening to them. And more will be invented tomorrow.
I sometimes thing that if I had an X-ray photo of the average person’s mind it would look like a personalized cable news channel, with breaking news crawling at the bottom, headline themes on top, and somewhere in between sports scores, weather reports, calendars, appointments, and people’s names and titles flashing by in an instant.
THE ENERGY DRAIN OF INFORMATION SATURATION
Knowledge may be power; however, information overload is anything but. Information overload is just, well, noise.
When we gorge on media, it’s about as satisfying as downing a vat of cotton candy, and in both cases, we eventually feel the after effects (either with an upset stomach or a throbbing headache). The age of information saturation has rewired our brains and given us all a mild case of ADD. More than that, it’s left most of us feeling more than a little overwhelmed and exhausted.
The great philosopher, social critic, and historian Theodore Roszak once said, “A weekday edition of the New York Times contains more information than the average person was likely to come across in a lifetime in seventeenth-century England”. Even if you don’t read the Times on a daily basis, you can probably relate to the sentiment. And Roszak made that statement almost twenty years ago.
We spend countless hours trying to keep up, to the detriment of important things such as relationships, health, and energy.
TUNE OUT AND REV UP
So here’s my suggestion for an immediate boost in energy: have a media-free day. No Internet, no email, no television, no iPods, no radio, no newspaper, no magazines. And no Black Barries (you know who you are!). For one day consider the possibility that there is nothing you need to know. Instead, spend that attention on your own experience, feeling your own energy accumulate rather than letting it dissipate as you attend to millions of distractions, most of which, when you really think about it, won’t make much difference in the long run anyway.
Now you may have to do this on a weekend, but that’s okay. With your free hours, enjoy leisurely meals with family or friends, have real conversations, take time to think, take a hike, take a swim, take a nap, and, at the end of your day off, take stock. Did the world as we know it end because you weren’t plugged in?
Now let me be honest: No one is more guilty of being overly plugged I than I am. That’s why I know the truth of what I’m saying. When you take a break (however temporarily) and disconnect, you will be amazed at the ultimate boost you’ll get in your energy. Learning how to do so may actually make you a more discerning and discriminating consumer of information once you reconnect. You’ll be amazed to find how much time you waste attending to things that really, ultimately, don’t matter, at least not to you or anyone you care about.
If you end the day more relaxed, more satisfied, and more energized, consider limiting your media intake every day – perhaps do without television on Mondays, ban Web-surfing on Tuesday, leave your BlackBerry in the office during lunch, and so on. You might find that a little less useless information makes you a lot more productive and energized.
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