thoughts.on.code

I have an addiction. It is a seemingly innocuous one, but really it is quite insideous. I am addicted to the instant gratification of the Web. ATOM/RSS feeds, PodCasts, News Stories. I love them all. I could not get enough.

But, when something around you (or in my case the amount of information coming at you) becomes too intoxicating, you have a choice: either realize that it is a problem and step away, or allow yourself to be consumed. In my case, it has been a constant struggle to keep focused while on a computer, and since that is the source of my financial stability, it is a problem that needs to be controlled.

Yesterday I read a great post by Steve Pavlina called 30 Days to Success about trying things out for 30 days and at the end of that “30 day trial period” you can make a choice whether to continue on with the change, or revert back, or try something else. The idea is that you are not forced into a “holy cow I can’t do this for the rest of my life” position, so it is not so daunting. And, after 30 days you have the start of a habit. Its much easier to continue than before.

So, yesterday I started to remove those items from my web inputs (MyYahoo, Google Frontpage, Bloglines, Mailing lists) that were not of importance to me. My rule is pretty simple: If I need it I will find out about it. Either freinds will tell my about this “cool new thing” or I will find it on my own when I need a solution.

• I kept were the blogs of friends and colleagues. I went from over 100 feeds to 18, 5 of which are comics (haven’t given those up… yet), 1 is a feed I really enjoy and does not inundate me with posts, and the rest are local people.
• I have also gotten rid of all of the news feeds and extraneous crap that I used to pay attention to… things like engadget and gizmodo. They show neat things, but overall do not positively affect my life.
• Every peice of mail in my inbox that had an unsubscribe link on it has been unsubscribed. I will keep doing this until I do not get any more.
• I went through my contacts list and removed anyone I have not talked to in the last year. Cut the list in half.

Here is an “after” shot of my My Yahoo page. I used to have to scroll and scroll and scroll to get to the bottom. Not anymore

I am still using Google’s customized homepage, which I actually just started using about two weeks ago. Here is how that page looks: