How To Think Like A 21st Century Entrepreneur. Tips For Success And Getting Ahead In The Information Age.

Sorry, I could not read the content fromt this page.Sorry, I could not read the content fromt this page.

View the original article here

A Survival Guide for Beating Information Addiction

Are you suffering from information addiction? It’s a growing problem as people spend more and more of their time online — and while online tools are amazing, being addicted to checking them can steal most of your day.

You know you’re an information addict if you:

Check email, Facebook, news, or some other social network first thing in the morning and last thing at night.Are constantly on your mobile device when you’re away from home/office.Can’t get away from the computer in order to get outside, exercise, or spend time with people while disconnected.Are constantly posting to Facebook or Twitter or Instagram, or texting/emailing, when meeting with other people.Can’t get important work done because you have to check your messages.Feel anxiety if you’re completely disconnected for more than a few minutes.Can’t imagine spending an entire day disconnected.

Now, if none of these seem like a problem for you, even if you do them, then they probably aren’t a problem. But if you see yourself in one or more of these and want to change, this guide is for you.

This survival guide isn’t the ultimate guide to beating an addiction, however — it’s a set of tips and techniques I’ve used to survive the constant pull of the online world.

Don’t know where to start? These first steps can be done today.

1. Assess your habits. What are you addicted to most? When are you most likely to be sucked into your addiction? For the rest of today, and the next several days, keep a handy little piece of paper and a pen/pencil with you, and write down the things you check often, putting a tally mark next to those things each time you check them. A TV news channel? Facebook or Twitter or G+? Pinterest or Reddit? Keep a tally so you know what you’re dealing with.

2. Introduce the pause. Addictions are something we often do automatically, without thinking. Start to break this chain of trigger-habit auto-response by wedging a small pause in between them. When you get the urge to check something you’re addicted to, notice this urge, and pause for just one second. During this pause, simply ask yourself, “Do I really want to do this, and why?” You can then go on to do it, no matter what the answer, but the important thing is having at least the briefest pause.

3. Take a break every hour. Even if you’re stuck on the sites you’re addicted to all day long, take 1o minute breaks once an hour. Set up an hourly reminder on your computer, and when that reminder pops up, get away from the computer. Take a walk for 10 minutes. Stretch. Do some pushups and squats. Clean your messy house. Write in a notebook, or sketch. Talk to someone in person. Drink some water and have a fruit. Meditate. When you come back to the computer, try closing the browser for a few minutes and doing some non-Internet work before going back online.

Over the long term, you can change your habits. This will take a month or two, so you’ll want to fully commit to a change. Any change done half-assed won’t last.

1. Start with your biggest trigger. Assuming you’ve done the assessment and introduced the pause as recommended above, you should know your most common triggers — the things that cause you to go check something. That might be things like: starting a work task (and wanting to avoid it), getting on a bus/train, waking up, eating, getting a notification on your phone or computer, being bored or stressed, thinking of something you want to look up. Whatever your triggers are, pick the one that happens most. If there are several, just pick one of those randomly.

2. Pick a replacement habit. What do you want to do instead of checking email, Facebook, Twitter or the like? Pick something positive and fun that you can do in 5 minutes every time your most common trigger happens. That might be: reading a few pages of a novel, journaling, doing pushups, taking a walk, drinking water, meditating, writing, painting, practicing a language, writing a letter with paper and pen, etc. You’re going to try to do this every time the habit happens, instead of the actual habit.

3. Do the new habit after the trigger, every time. Don’t allow any exceptions, or you won’t form the habit. A new habit is formed much faster, and more strongly, if you do it extremely consistently after the trigger. If you’re inconsistent, and still do the old habit, you are allowing the old habit to stay in place. Now, just because you miss once or twice doesn’t mean you should give up — just start again and try to be more consistent, figure out why you failed, and plan to beat that obstacle. But set a rule that you’ll allow no exceptions!

4. Use positive public pressure. Having accountability helps. Blogging about your new change, or posting it on Facebook or Twitter (I know, a bit ironic), can help you feel some public accountability. Tell everyone you know that you’re not going to check Facebook (for example) within 15 minutes of starting an important work task. My friend Michael Ellsberg uses negative consequences (something I’ve done in the past as well): if he eats sugar or refined carbs, he has to make a donation to Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign (not a good thing for Michael, who is not a Romney supporter). Leverage the power of social media to beat social media.

In the long run, it’s good to have an idea of what life would be like if you’re not controlled by an information addiction.

How will you work? What will you be like if you’re not checking things all day? Some things to consider:

The goal isn’t to eliminate all information sources and be shut off from the online world. It’s not to throw out your iPhone or laptop. These tools are incredibly useful and powerful — obviously I make my living using them, and they have changed our lives in so many positive ways. The idea is simply not to be controlled by them, and to have a balanced life that includes other activities.Schedule time for non-Internet and non-media activities. That means actually block them off on your schedule. If you want to exercise, block off some time during the week for exercise (even just 30 minutes 3 times a week). Schedule time to spend with your friend and loved ones. Schedule time for a walk in solitude.Work without distractions. Each morning, figure out the 1-3 important things you’re going to get done that day. Do the first one first, before diving into email and online distractions. Shut down your browser if you can. If necessary, do the work somewhere without Internet, or unplug your router and give the router cord to someone to hold for an hour. Turn off all notifications on your computer and mobile device. Close everything but what you need to do your task. Learn to focus.Schedule a limited time for your information sources. How often do you want to check email and Facebook (or other sites)? Pick a time and schedule for using these tools in your life, and set a limit — twice a day for just 15 minutes a session, for example. This limit allows you to use these tools but also have time for other things, and it forces you to decide what’s important within that limit and to use the limited time efficiently.Choose your sources wisely. Cull your information sources and tools to the most important. Sometimes we use things just because everyone else is, but they might not be really adding much to our lives. For example, I deleted my Facebook account last year, and haven’t missed it. My life goes on! You might decide to delete your Instagram or Pinterest account, to save yourself from endless browsing of things that aren’t really important, for example. You might decide to only read 10 really good blogs instead of 50 ones that take up your attention. Your attention matters — you should only give it to the things that make your life better.Get some sleep. A lack of rest makes us less able to focus, and more likely to deviate from a plan of any kind of self-control. It also makes us more likely to be distracted by the Internet, according to a new study. Make rest a priority.

View the original article here

How to Consume Your Digital Information More Efficiently

As the amount of information that is potentially important to us continues to grow, it’s now more vital than ever to be able to process and consume it more efficiently. Here are some tactics to help you become more efficient with your time and information processing.

If you aren’t an RSS user, you should be. It’s an excellent way to become efficient with your time and a good way to get through a bunch of information to find the important stuff quickly. Only subscribe to sites that inform you directly or entertain you.

According to Clay Johnson in his book “The Information Diet”, we should be consuming information that is as close to the source as possible, then researching if it is something that we need to know.

This is a good way to approach the RSS feeds that you follow. For instance, the tech/gadget sites I follow are The Verge, Engadget, and CNET’s main feed. This gives me a nice pool of headlines to scan during the day. I spend about 15 minutes every 2 – 3 hours scanning the new headlines. If I see something I want to follow up on I star it. If it is something that is a longer piece that I want to read, I send it to Instapaper to read later.

When following up with a starred headline, I will do a search for the topic and see what some pundits and other outlets are saying about it. Then if I see something that is worth reading, I will throw it in Instapaper for later. Also, if I come across some sort of reference article that I will want to consult later, I send it to Evernote and archive it.

Later in the evening I spend no more than 30 minutes consuming my Instapaper queue. This whole process takes up about 1.25 – 1.5 hours per day.

Some people think that clearing out your inbox is all about doing everything that is in your inbox. This isn’t the case at all. You clear out your inbox to find the work that needs to be done and then put it in a place that you can do later, throughout your day.

My process is what David Allen suggests:

Read the first email in your inbox and ask yourself, “is this actionable?”If it is and it will take 2 minutes or less (replying to a simple question, setting up a quick meeting, etc.) then do it. If there is followup to the email, put the sent email in an “@waiting” folder.If it is actionable and will take more than 2 minutes, put it in an “@action” folder and track the task in your task application.If it is reference, archive it away.

This process keeps you up on what you need to do and helps you identify any action you need to take that has come through in the form of email. I get a lot of email between work, Lifehack, and personal stuff (about 100 emails a day). Even with that load it still only takes me about 15 – 30 minutes a day to keep up with it.

Keeping up with all of your hundreds of “friends” can be daunting and even annoying. This is one of the reasons that I still don’t have a Facebook account and am still apprehensive of using things like Google+ to their full extent. I feel that social networking can sometimes be a bit of a time-suck. But, you can still be efficient with it.

Only friend and follow people that matter to you. While using Twitter, one can get pretty carried away with their number of followers. It’s important to keep them down to a minimum. Only follow people that bring you important information and that keep you entertained. Oh, and of course follow your friends.

Try to treat social networks and groups the same way you would email and RSS:

Go through the information quickly.Anything that you can quickly share or comment on, do it while you are scanning your feeds.Anything that will take some time to comment on or create, track it in your task list and set discrete time during the day to take care of it.

You don’t have to be like a robot with social networks though. There is nothing at all wrong with trolling forums, Twitter, and Facebook every so often. Just don’t make a habit of it. You’ve got more important things to do, right?

Information “overload” is here to stay. There is no stopping it. So, rather than be a luddite and unplug completely, use these tips to keep up with what is important to you and the things that you need to get done in a more efficient way. If you follow a routine of combing the information that has made its way to your life’s inbox, you can keep up with it and handle it effectively.

(Photo credit: A technology man has images around his head via Shutterstock)

Chris is a developer, writer, tech enthusiast, and husband. He holds a degree in MIS and CMPSC from Penn State Behrend. Chris is also interested in personal productivity, creativity and how to use technology to get things done. Check out his writing at devburner.net or follow him on Twitter.

View the original article here

Book Review: The Information Diet

According to Clay Johnson, the author of the newly published and released book The Information Diet, we as information workers and seekers are bloated on what our televisions and our mainstream media outlets give us as “news” and need to redefine our information consumption as badly as we need to redefine our food diets. We don’t consume information deliberately and the information that we do consume is usually biased towards what we already believe. This can not only misinform us but can also waste our time and help us engrain biases that we have built up in our lives.

Clay Johnson is the founder of Blue State Digital which was the company that built and ran President Obama’s campaign for presidency in 2008. But, hold on you conservatives; Johnson does a decent job of keeping many of his political views out of this book.

Instead of following our information bias and catering to it, Johnson suggests that we challenge our ideas and also get to the bottom of the “information trophic pyramid.” A trophic pyramid is basically a way to describe an ecosystem with the primary producers at the base (where the most energy is stored) with smaller groups of consumers at the top. Johnson uses this model to describe how our “information diets” need to be shaped; we need to grab our information as close to the source as possible and synthesize it for ourselves.

Johnson says that our information diets are made up of too much entertainment and information that affirms what we already believe (mass affirmation) and he compares this to your poor American diets. We consume whatever “tastes the best” and almost ignore everything else.

It’s a good analogy, comparing and criticizing our standard American diet, one of too many bad fats, processed carbs, and not enough “real” ingredients, but after several chapters of building up the analogy I almost felt that I needed an information diet from The Information Diet. That may be harsh, but the historical information about how our food is processed is nothing new and I feel that Johnson could have written less about food and more about how we should process information as well as the best places to get it.

In the second part of the book, Johnson goes on to explain how we should consume our information. He simplifies it the most saying that we should, “Consume deliberately. Take in information over affirmation.” This is a great quote to remember as we go through our day, but can be a bit simplistic for someone that wants to totally revamp the way that they consume and process information. That may be the point, but it feels that Johnson took this simplistic approach almost too far and left out a lot of information in this section of the book making it quite open-ended for the reader.

The chapters that actually contained “The Information Diet” felt too short and gave a lot of tips and tricks about obtaining, consuming, and spending time with our information that have been old hat for many information workers and creators. Johnson suggests consuming information that is as close to the source as possible, lacks a strong bias, and that we consume this information deliberately throughout our day by following a a schedule. Johnson considers basically anything that we watch through a screen as a form of information and that we should try very hard to stick to around 6 hours to that type of consumption a day, leaving the rest for time to create and spend quality time with friends and family.

Johnson also recommends some great tools for keeping track of your time like RescueTime and also tools for making your web reading better and less advertisement-prone like Instapaper and Readability.

One of my favorite portions of the book is the “Dear Programmer” section (probably has nothing to do with me being a developer) where Johnson makes a call out to developers to try to get involved in creating tools that help citizens dicipher complex information and help out local governments with creating tools and services that make them more efficient. I believe that Johnson could have devoted even more time to this in the book, but it appears that his website is going to help with pushing local “Information Diet” meetup groups where developers and creatives can get involved.

Johnson also recommends getting involved with the group Hacks/Hackers which is a group that tries to connect journalists (hacks) and developers (hackers) to work on joint ventures and ways to create better outlets for media.

The Information Diet is definitely the kind of book that we need to read going into 2012 with all of the junk information online and on our TVs trying to creep into our lives and not making us think critically. Johnson makes a good argument of why we need to get our information closer to the source and how to manage our time when it comes to consuming it, but I feel that there is too much discussion of food and how it relates to our information diet. I understand that Johnson is trying to make his point and view a stronger one, but more time could have been spent in the second and third sections of the book explaining how we need to critique the information that we consume.

Should you buy the book? For a measly $10 for the Kindle version, I think that the Information Diet has more good information in it than not, with the second and third sections of the book being the most practical.

Chris is a developer, writer, tech enthusiast, and husband. He holds a degree in MIS and CMPSC from Penn State Behrend. Chris is also interested in personal productivity, creativity and how to use technology to get things done. Check out his writing at devburner.net or follow him on Twitter.

View the original article here

Do You Need an Information Detox?

Too much information can tip the scales...and not in your favour.

Could you imagine going a full day without your iPhone or BlackBerry? What would it be like if you couldn’t check Facebook and see what your friends had been up to? Or if Twitter was temporarily out of action and your feed of 140 character messages were eliminated from your day? What if the newspaper didn’t arrive — and you had no Internet access? What a nightmare! How would we survive this hypothetical day of disconnection?

We regularly hear talk of the modern phenomenon, “Information Overload”, but have you noticed that we rarely hear anything about “Information Detox”? In other facets of our lives if we over-consume, the consensual thinking is to reduce, eliminate or detox. If you over-consume at a party on Saturday night, the first thing you’re likely to think of doing on Sunday is to clean out your body so that it can return to a state of improved energy and health.

A detox (or detox diet) aims to remove the toxins that have accumulated in your body and rejuvenate your health. After a detox, people claim to feel “light” and healthy again.

So…could we take this idea and carry it out with our information consumption?

To borrow one of my mother’s favourite sayings, “Everything in moderation”, too much of anything is not good. The same goes for information consumption. Too much of it is a bad thing. But how can information be negative?

It disturbs our focus. When we are always connected, it is much more difficult to keep our attention on the job that needs doing. We start to believe we are missing something. If we don’t log in to Twitter or Facebook, we may have missed something really interesting or relevant.

It can create stress. We are bombarded with information from all areas: newspapers, newsletters, news feeds. The danger is that we feel obliged to read all of this information. We believe that in some way our lives will be lacking if we don’t consume all the material that comes our way. This can create the subconscious anxiety that we always have something we need to do.

It fosters negativity. The media is full of negative news these days. Do we need to fill our days with these unpleasant thoughts and images? Wouldn’t it be a lot more pleasant to surround ourselves with positivity and inspiration?

We fail to be present. Look around you everywhere you go. Whether you are walking down a street in the United States or in New Zealand, the Netherlands or Abu Dhabi, wherever you look you will see the same picture. People absorbed by their mobile phones, engrossed in the “conversations” they are having. Talk or text — it doesn’t matter — they are detached from the reality around them. They are not living their lives in the present moment. If we allow this to continue, our personal relationships can suffer. The more we connect online the more we detach ourselves from our local community. Our jobs can suffer from the lack of focus and distraction. Our health can suffer from the stress and pressure to stay informed and connected. Ultimately, we may miss out on the beauty and possibilities of life.

Here are some suggestions that you can try to get started. If you are feeing brave, try all of them for a week. If you want to try using baby steps, choose one each day this week and see how it changes your life for the better.

1. Switch off your phone when you get home from work.
2. Don’t use your phone on your way to and from work. Listen to music or read a novel.
3. Don’t access Facebook and Twitter for one week.
4. Don’t read any material that is not uplifting and motivational.
5. Turn off all email notifications or any other social media messages.
6. Do not watch the television for one week.
7. No newspapers, online news or any other form of world news access.

I would love to hear more suggestions and feedback. Let me know if you plan to try an Information Detox in the comments — and then come back and let me know how it turned out!

Ciara Conlon is a Personal Productivity Coach and author. Her mission is to help people achieve their best through working efficiently and being positive and present. “Through Productivity and Positivity I believe there is little we can’t achieve” go to Productivity & Positivity and get Free eBook called Clear the Clutter; Find Your Life

View the original article here

Total information war

Perhaps one of the most important articles yet published on military infowar, propaganda, media influence and PSYOPs has appeared online.

Called ‘Military Social Influence in the Global Information Environment: A Civilian Primer’ – the piece is written by psychologist Sarah King who outlines the theory and practice of US information warfare as it stands today.

Although the piece gives a fascinating and sometimes jaw dropping account of US information operations (replete with examples) it serves as an essential general introduction to how military thinking has moved on from assuming wars are fought with troops on the ground to conceptualising conflict as inseparable from its social impact.

A more prominent view among information warriors is that changes in information, technology, and social influence capabilities have actually transformed the terms of war. War between standing armies of nation-states is seen as increasingly unlikely, both because the United States is an unmatched military superpower and because damage that would result from use of modern physical weapon systems is deemed intolerable.

Our military’s enemies, experts predict, are most likely to be small, rogue groups who attempt to prevail by winning popular support and undermining U.S. political will for war. The argument here is that in most modern war, physical battles, if they exist, will be for the purpose of defining psychological battlespace.

What’s striking is the effort to dominate all aspects of the ‘information sphere’ – from public opinion, to news coverage, to acceptance on the ground, to shaping the general cultural concept of the country’s military.

The many examples given of how this has been attempted during the recent and ongoing conflict are completely fascinating.

If you only ever read one article on ‘information ops’ make it this one. It’s online and open-access with expert commentary due to appear during the year.

Link to excellent InfoWar article (thanks Stephan!).

View the original article here