How to Break Your 'Info Porn' Habit

I often joke with my friends that I have a "house porn" habit. I love catching those DIY shows on TV and I swoon over before-and-after house makeover displays.

I've even been known to furtively pick up a copy of one of those home remodeling magazines when checking out at Home Depot.

But it never occurred to me that I may have a similar addiction to data until I read a blog post by Andre Kibbe at Tools for Thought about curbing information porn.

Andre wrote,

"I like information. And that's the problem -- I can consume it indefinitely. It's not a case of information overload, but of information porn: gratuitous reading used to alleviate boredom or anxiety rather than enable positive change or solve a problem."

As a journalist, I've been trained to dig up information to support my articles and to keep up with current events, but there are times I have to admit that I go overboard -- when I end up with a dozen bookmarked sites, five downloaded reports, and eight phone interviews to write a simple 800-word story. Talk about overkill.

And my RSS feeds are admittedly out of control. Why I think I have time to read four major newspapers and five dozen blogs daily, along with six or seven newsletters, I do not know.

And my mailman has been known to joke with me about the volume of magazines I subscribe to; at last count, it was three weeklies and 11 monthlies. (Yes, I tip him very well at the holidays.)

So I read with interest about Andre's experiences with a low-information diet and approach to "batching" his information to keep it in check. Andre decided to make Sunday his non-recreational information day -- the day in which he'd read his nonfiction books, a copy of one weekly news magazine, and any online articles he'd bookmarked the previous week.

His exceptions: e-mail and other messaging, two-minute reads, fiction (which is for fun), and information needed to resolve a problem or an active project.

Well, it sounds like a decent approach for some...but not for me. As a blogger and journalist, I think a once-a-week news download wouldn't keep me current enough. And batching all my reading and research into one day sounds like a recipe for making my head explode.

On the other hand, it was a real eye-opener to realize how much gratuitous information is flowing into my life on a daily basis. So I took a bit of a different approach.

1. First, I used Google Reader's folder feature to organize my RSS feeds into three categories: work, career, and fun. The former is for my day-to-day assignments as a journalist and blogger. The second is for big-picture stuff about journalism, writing, editing, and so forth. The third -- well, that's obvious. The immediate benefit? I no longer get sidetracked reading a work blog only to notice an adjacent "fun" blog and think, "Oh, I'll just check it out quickly." I can save the mindless stuff for when I truly have time to kill.
2. Second, I deleted three of my four newspaper feeds. Did I really need to read multiple versions of the same news stories? I picked my favorite and decided to read it for 15 minutes, first thing in the morning. I also cut my newsletter subscriptions in half and now reserve Friday afternoons for skimming them.
3. As for my magazines at home, I've made them off-limits during working hours. Now they're on my coffee table and nightstand instead of my desk.

Have you had a run-in with info porn? And how did you break your habit? I'd love to hear your ideas.

(image by Erlon Jequie via Flickr, CC 2.0)