To be specific, say NO to TV programmes.

Steve Pavlina on how TV affects personal productivity…

After seeing that my TV habits were basically a dead-end in terms of their potential entertainment value, I decided to begin another 30-day TV fast, and after that I??l assess if I want to drop TV for good. I started at the beginning of the month, so I?? more than halfway through it already.

I do have a TV at home, which is not connected to the aerial port. Hence, the only function of my 29″ JVC Television Set is to feed my occassional PS2 game cravings, and I must admit I haven’t been playing my PS2 for over 4 months. You can say that the TV I bought was a real bad investment, in fact, I bought the PS2 first before I bought the TV. I have been disconnected from TV since 6 years ago, which was about the time I befriended the Internet.

My problem with media addiction is not TV, but rather, the Internet, the very medium I am using to communicate with you now! It can be really addictive especially when you are always getting fresh information and interesting ideas from all around the world. It’s precisely the nature of this abundance of information that makes the Internet a more dangerous medium than the TV when it comes to sucking up one’s time.
I have since been trying to figure out the best way to ensure I keep my browsing time to the minimum. I have generally divided my internet activities into 2 main components:

i) Internet-For-Work

This would include everything that I will need to get my work done, for instance researching and referencing. In this sense, the Internet works as a very good companion to look for quick information, though nothing beat the printed books when it comes to quality information. Also, the Internet-For-Work includes paying my bills, transferring credits and checking up on my client’s database.

ii) Internet-For-Fun

This is more of leisure surfing and includes blogging. I currently restrict myself to use “Internet-For-Fun” after working hours, usually around 8 pm till midnight. The idea is to just check mails, reply them and check out my Bloglines feed, my Adsense earnings, some forums and yahoo groups I am subscribed too.

To be honest, I am still pretty much beaten by the Internet at this moment. I realized that it’s taking up more time than I should be allocating to it. Of course, I am not going to give in to the problem. My next step is to come up with a written time-table for my online activities and commit to it for as long as I can. Maybe downgrading to dial-up connection would be a good demotivation…

Sometimes, we just have to face the fact that there’s just too much (mis)information on the Internet and there’s no way we can digest them all. Instead of using an outer to inner approach, where we let these abundance of information conquer us, a much more ideal solution would be to use an inner to outer approach, where we filter very strictly the information we want and then, concentrate on getting the best information out of the Internet. This would mean that we have to be more disciplined when bookmarking, tagging and subscribing to the RSS that is available out there.

Less is more!

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