Step 3: Reduce Inputs from the Cloud
NOTE: This portion is still in progress. Things to do:
- Add a proper opening section
- Citations and references
As of today, one of the largest Web sites on the planet is Facebook. Facebook has more than 500 million users registered on the site, not including numerous corporations that make their presence. In a world of 6.8 billion people, this means that about 7% of the world’s population has an account on Facebook – about one in fourteen people. Facebook ranks up alongside Google as one of the most-visited Web sites in the world.
The important distinction of Facebook from every other social media site is with the scope of communications it provides. It is true that there is a lot of connection and relationships forming on the site. For many people, Facebook provides an opportunity to connect with people in a way unlike any other. Many long-lost friends, co-workers, family and associations can be found and joined. This is good for creating online communities and maintaining contact that was otherwise very expensive or difficult to do. However, there are several significant concerns with how Facebook manages data that make it difficult to recommend as a primary social media site.
Facebook spent a lot of time building a lot of revolutionary sharing tools into the site. Members can share photos and video at any time, and users can indicate where their friends are in the photos. As of this writing, however, there is virtually no moderation of the content that you may be directly or indirectly associated with. Friends can tag you in photos and video that do not represent who you are or were without your initial consent. Fortunately, consent can be removed but only after the content has been tagged. Facebook has discussed pre-moderation of content (e.g. A notification sent to you to approve a photo tag), but it appears it may be some time before this is fully implemented.
One important distinction to take note is in how much customization is allowed on Facebook. Besides allowing for what data is allowable to be viewed, there is virtually no other customization allowed. One cannot have a custom background or layout based on your preferences. It’s possible that Facebook may allow some customization in the future, but it depends on if any users want that functionality. For now, every Facebook user or fan page has the same generic look and feel. As one person put it, it’s like Facebook built a housing property for 500 million people, and each room is basically the same except for different pictures on the wall and different messages flowing through the site.
Security is another issue in the implementation of Facebook. By default, nearly everything you contribute to your profile on Facebook is publicly viewable. While some people are comfortable with this level of transparency, the public information displayed in Facebook has been used in employment decisions. There have been a couple of high-profile instances where Facebook had to revise security parameters; however, even today most users find the settings to be complicated and confusing to implement.
Continuing with the theme of transparency in the implementation of Facebook, it specifies virtually open access by default. For instance, almost any user of the site can send you a message through Facebook, even if they are not friends or part of your community. This can be a good thing as it allows for the free flow of communication to establish identity and to pass on information between acquaintances that are not part of your friend and social network. While most people are aware of this functionality and it can be disabled, few people actually take the time to go through the security parameters to do so. Moreover, almost everything is set up to post publicly. While some people are okay with this, it goes against the suggestion to have levels of access between one’s public persona and one that is more private.
One other consideration with Facebook is that it was designed for people to stay on the site for long periods of time. It appears that without significant modifications of the notification settings, almost everything that someone can do that has your name attached to it generates a notification. If someone sends an e-mail, posts on your profile page, tags you in a photo, or even responds to a comment you posted on someone’s profile update, you will likely receive a notification. This has the effect of cluttering one’s mailbox at best (see below regarding e-mail), and having to log on and review everyone’s content that you are associated with at worst. The face time on Facebook also allows for the exposure of targeted advertising based on the content you post and respond to. Sometimes the Facebook engine gets it wrong (I still get ads for dentistry marketing for some reason), but at this stage Facebook primarily receives revenue from advertisements. This brings up the question of it being healthy to stay online and watch advertisements for hours a day as one would watching television – do we want to sit on Facebook to read and click on ads to buy things we may not need?
All in all, Facebook is asking the question of how we want to share ourselves to the world and be a part of our digital bodymind. The way Facebook is set up implies that Facebook LLC would like to set the terms of how your digital bodymind is displayed to the world. For most people, this may be sufficient as they do not want to worry about increasing the technical complexity of their lives. However, it is important to be aware of how we use Facebook and other digital media so we can set the necessary levels and filters on the information we disseminate. Even with the possibilities of disallowing content to be posted on one’s profile, it can take a significant amount of effort to maintain a presence on Facebook as it is coded today. Based on what I’ve described here, some people have taken the steps of removing themselves from Facebook entirely due to implementation issues, the lack of moderation control, or the lack of content control.
Everett suggests that Facebook is to be completely avoided and that removing your profile is the first major step to creating your second self on the Internet. My suggestion is to reduce the time you spend and contributions you make to the site first, while setting up the necessary internal and external filters on the information you share on Facebook. Place a priority on sharing high-quality content on your Facebook profile. Do not fall for the need to contribute to every conversation you see from your friends, as that keeps you in the loop of the site through notifications. Instead, make an honest effort to communicate with them in a personal manner if it is necessary to do so, while posting a minimal amount of content to your personal profile.
As of this writing I use Facebook as a primarily one-way extension (feed) of my Web presence and to connect to friends and associates that I don’t normally get to talk to. I may not get to see everything that my friends are doing, but it allows an avenue for them to contact me and get to know who I am on a more intimate level.
In terms of social media platforms, Twitter is the next largest after Facebook. Over three hundred million accounts are online with Twitter today. What was considered a fringe site four years ago is now very popular with sharing information and ideas to the public. After months of experimentation where many derided it as a site where you post updates of using the bathroom or eating lunch, it has become a contribution point for help requests, valuable information, and a near-real-time gauge of the world’s emotions and thoughts.
Twitter’s infrastructure is different than most other sites. Twitter is based on messages that are 140 characters or less, following the SMS protocol used with cell phones. All postings are public except direct messages, and there is no mailbox associated with the service. Specifically targeted messages are done using the @ symbol, though these are essentially public as well. While there are capabilities to restrict access to a Twitter account, most people do not use the feature. The hash-tag (#) functionality is used to tag messages with specific subjects for search and to build communities and notifications of ongoing events. Postings to the service are called “tweets”, and most anyone on the service can “follow” your postings. Any accounts you follow are in the “following” bucket of your profile. Third party applications like feed readers and Web sites can be used to post content automatically to your profile. There are also numerous Twitter clients to help in managing the content from those that are being followed and from those following your account.
Currently this is Everett’s primary method of communication outside of his blog. The service allows for all targeted messages to appear while allowing for personal and private conversations. Unlike e-mail or Facebook, there is no mailbox to manage. There is also no permission to ask to follow an account either. This functionality makes it easy to create a feed of followers which gives instant updates to what content they are producing.
Everett has two rules when it comes to using Twitter:
- Follow less than fifty accounts.
- Work to get your following count high by publishing quality content to Twitter, engaging with your followers, and responding to targeted messages as appropriate.
The first rule is a by-product of minimalism and the social complexity the average person can handle. The more accounts followed, the propensity there is for more postings to hit your account’s feed occur over time. People with thousands of following accounts can literally see their feed stream along in real time, similar to being in a ballroom with thousands of ongoing conversations at once. In that case there isn’t much opportunity to read and reflect on everyone’s postings, even if some of them are mundane. Many Twitter applications only retrieve the last 100 or 200 tweets, so it is possible that entire conversations or opportunities are lost when following large numbers of accounts. Thus, by following only the accounts of those you truly value, the less information there is to take in when reviewing and interacting with Twitter.
Note that it is also possible to follow zero accounts on Twitter. There’s nothing wrong with doing so; in fact, people like Steve Pavlina do so. Using Twitter this way is similar to posting content to a feed than using the service to grow conversations and connections.
The second rule is a guiding principle of the second self. By creating valuable content that people want to follow, the second self develops into something that can eventually sustain itself. There is no magic formula for the content itself; some of it can be informational, some of it can be based on a living an authentic and compelling lifestyle, and so on. The content will determine the followers that your second self will attract, and can be an important mechanism to have the digital cloud assist in the building of your second self.
Personally, my use of Twitter tends to follow Everett’s but I see things differently than he does. Like Everett, I follow less than 100 people because I want to savor the conversations I have with others and take a genuine interest in contributing to their efforts. I also did not have the luxury of using a good Twitter client to start, so I had trouble seeing over 200 messages if I was not able to log on to Twitter within a few hours. Yet I do not believe that focusing on the “follower-to-following” ratio is a good idea, especially when starting out on Twitter. It is true that an appearance of exclusivity is maintained by minimizing the number of followers while the follower list grows. However, I know people who follow almost everyone who follows them or have thousands of people that they are following and are also successful in the Twitter world and in creating their second self.
I encourage experimentation with following accounts, creating lists, and using third-party tools first before worrying about the potential impacts of having too many followers. As in building the second self, it’s not the tools that create it, it’s the content you contribute. Make sure to spend the time to get the clarity around how you want to use Twitter to build your second self. Like Facebook, Twitter can also be a major time sink or it can help you in ways that aren’t imaginable. It is ultimately up to you to play with the tools to see if it works for your second self’s wishes.
Up until the 1970’s, the primary form of two-way print communication was by writing letters and using the post office. Collaboration through letters is a simplex operation: one person had to write the letter, send it out, and wait for the other person to write back. This process could take days, weeks or even months depending on how physically far apart the two parties were. While the telephone was a widely available real-time communication method since the 1920’s, the cost of access and the amount of information transfer possible relative to its costs made it prohibitively expensive. In the United States, the American Telephone and Telegraph Company was a de facto monopoly until 1982, and telephone access was priced accordingly.
The advent of computers and computer networks led to a protocol that disseminated written information much faster than any print material to date. The advent of the e-mail protocol allowed users with computer access to exchange written communications without spending money on paper and postage on a nearly real-time basis. E-mail gained acceptance with more Internet users as they gained access to the electronic networks, though it evolved over time. Most people didn’t have access to personal computers until the late 1980’s, and by then large corporations such as CompuServe and AOL were the primary providers of electronic media. It was only in the mid-1990’s that the cost of access and computing power became cheap and available enough that e-mail took off. The cost of e-mail is now effectively the cost of access to the World Wide Web with Web-enabled e-mail providers such as Hotmail and Google. One does not need to even own a computer to use e-mail; smartphones and shared personal computers allow for available access.
Unfortunately, in the last decade the proliferation of e-mail has caused a crisis with how much information we take in on a daily basis. Many corporations now use e-mail as the primary communication method to its employees and to potential customers. The corporate culture in which you work with may or may not allow for much flexibility in how to use e-mail; however, the tendency is that people receive too much e-mail that has low value and high urgency to respond. Consider asking a manager how much e-mail they process on a daily basis. If you are a manager, you already understand how much e-mail you receive and generate every day! My current manager spends all day either in meetings or responding to e-mail, and it seems to be a source of pride when he gets below 100 unread messages. I have a feeling that most management is tethered to their inboxes the way my immediate manager is.
Many books and resources are available that can help with the management of business e-mail correspondence. Two resources I recommend are “Getting Things Done” by David Allen and “Mastering Your Workday Now!” by Michael Linenberger. It also pays to have a conversation with your managers to discuss the role of e-mail in your workplace, especially if other forms of communication such as instant messaging, telephone and face-to-face communications. Do not expect the company culture regarding e-mail to change overnight, especially in a legal environment where e-mail is considered acceptable evidence in litigation. However, the tools you may have available to you can reduce the necessity to check e-mail and still keep the records keeping and traceability that corporations require.
While you may not be able to reduce or change the e-mail in your work world, you do have control over your personal e-mail. Today is the time in our lives where our personal e-mail addresses should no longer be a completely open gate to the world. While the financial cost of giving your e-mail address to someone or some company is zero, the true cost of communication comes in the time spent to read and act on the e-mail they send out. Hence it behooves you to look at how your personal e-mail is structured so that you spend less time reading and taking action on it.
A simple e-mail analysis can be done using the Pareto Principle. In the general sense, the Pareto Principle states that a minority of inputs is responsible for the majority of outputs. This principle is also known as the 80/20 Rule, as many found that 80% of the output in a given situation tends to come from 20% of the inputs. While the exact percentages vary depending on the person and their situation, in the case of e-mail the “input” is e-mail itself and the “output” is the actions you take based on the e-mails you receive. By identifying what e-mails you wish to truly receive and can take some sort of action on, the rest can be mitigated or removed so that there is less urgency to look at an e-mail inbox multiple times a day. Let’s see how this plays out.
The first thing to recognize with e-mail is that most correspondence is not actionable. Most e-mails are notifications that state that an action has already been taken or that they are receipts and acknowledgement that an action has been taken. These notifications are useful for records keeping and review, but there is not much action to take. For these kinds of communications, e-mail is a great way to go paperless – just store them somewhere (preferably out of your inbox) until they’re no longer needed.
Notifications can also generate a lot of unnecessary, unactionable e-mail. Recall that Facebook and other social media has the potential to generate a significant number of e-mails to keep you in the loop. For instance, I was set up to receive notifications from Twitter when someone followed me. After removing myself from actively participating on Facebook and cleaning up other e-mail subscriptions, I found that a large chunk of my daily e-mail was Twitter follow notifications. More importantly, Twitter didn’t notify me of all of them, especially if a few people would follow at the same time. Once I understood the low value of the notifications, I turned them off and instead asked people to start a conversation by mentioning me. From this, one major step you can use to reduce e-mail is to review the notifications you receive from social media sites and change the preferences accordingly, especially if you are committed to using social media sites regularly.
More importantly, e-mail is increasingly used by blogs and businesses as another mechanism to advertise their wares. Who doesn’t like getting an e-mail coupon to a store that they visit often? The problem lies in the volume of advertisements you may be subjected to in e-mail, even if most of the stores that have it are those you visit rarely. If you receive ten e-mails a day from corporations trying to sell you something, and you delete nine or all ten e-mails a day, what is the point in spending the time to process those e-mails? In these cases, it is best to remove yourself from their e-mail marketing lists or set up filters so that you do not have to spend the time to process those e-mails.
By removing myself from unnecessary blog e-mails, business e-mails, and social media notifications, I was able to reduce the amount of personal e-mail I receive to ten a day or less. Before this occurred I was frequently receiving upwards of forty persona e-mails a day, mostly company advertisements and Facebook notifications. Most of my e-mails today are either blog comment notifications, pay-for-access newsletter subscriptions, notifications of monetary transfers (e.g. If I bought something or for automatic payments), or the occasional friend e-mail.
Fortunately, the use of social media is replacing e-mail as the source of offers and notifications regarding potential deals from corporations. Many businesses have Twitter and Facebook accounts that they use to interact with customers and promote special offers. However, the most important use of social media is to use your network to provide the offers, deals and information that may be the most pertinent to you. If your network knows you through your real-world connections and your digital presence, they act as a high-quality filter for you to form new relationships with businesses and people as well as providing good daily deals. To sustain this, ensure that you contribute to your friends and social network by passing on recommendations, contacts and offers that they may enjoy. Be selective in what you send to the network, for your trust and reputation depends on it.
Improving Signal-To-Noise Ratio of Information Intake
The final consideration of reducing inputs from the cloud is to consider your other digital activities outside of e-mail and social media. Most people do not spend all of their time logged on to Facebook, much as it may seem some days. The Internet is used for a variety of things, from purchases to publishing content to entertainment. It is easy to spend a lot of time on the Internet outside of social media – this is what this section focuses on. For our discussion, signal is the high-quality content while noise is either spam or low-quality content. How you define what is signal and what is noise is up to you, but most people want to increase the signal-to-noise ratio, even if it’s only a qualitative description.
Most of this information isn’t new – in fact, most productivity books are based on becoming more efficient with information. Tim Ferriss also devotes a chapter to the “Low-Information Diet” that is also a worthwhile read. It is worth repeating as a reminder since information intake is the pre-work for building a successful digital bodymind. As I’ve discussed in this section, your interactions on the internet extend beyond the content you produce, so let’s dig in.
There are two steps to the signal-to-noise ratio that are used to increase it:
- Improve and increase the signal (quality) you are receiving.
- Reduce the noise you are receiving.
This process is identical to the reduction of e-mail I’ve described earlier. In looking at e-mail, our focus was on reducing the noise because that is the fastest way to achieving an equilibrium. With general content, it’s wise to both be on the lookout for high quality content while reducing the amount of filler that you process. Similar to e-mail and refining a budget, reducing the filler and noise is easier and faster initially. Consider the following options to reduce the amount of information, especially unwanted information, from your life.
First, review the blog subscriptions and RSS feeds that you are reading. Unsubscribe or delete any information that doesn’t contribute to your overall digital well-being. For instance, at one point I was following over thirty RSS feeds from different blogs that I felt obligated to read. Once I realized that some of the blogs I was reading were not contributing significantly, I slowly removed them from my feed reader. Right now I am only following nine feeds, of which one is my own blog for quality control purposes.
Second, set filters for spam and social media appropriately. Computer-based algorithms for e-mail will certainly help in terms of removing unwanted messages from your inbox. Consequently you may want to follow only a specific portion of your social media list. Setting lists in Twitter or Facebook is a good way of accomplishing this. Of course, it pays to review your social media following and cull the list on a regular basis. As stated before, Everett believes in following less than 50 people on Twitter; however, it may be possible to “follow” more people but only read and respond to mentions and a specific list of who you are following.
Third, consider your use of bookmarks. How often do you review your Web browser’s bookmarks to ensure that they are of high quality? It is worthwhile to clean out the bookmarks similar to file folders once every few months. Your tastes and appetite for information may change either in quality or preference (e.g. Changing genres or foci).
Fourth, consider your daily digital routines, especially in the morning and before you go to bed. Do you check e-mail once an hour? Do you read a lot of news sites like CNN and the BBC? How about checking Facebook for half an hour each morning and after dinner? Most often, the first and last things you read in a given day affect your emotions the most. For instance, I have to be careful not to be online after 10pm on weeknights; I have a tendency to not fall asleep easily if I take in too much online information after that time. Consider other activities and reducing your time on the Internet in general, but especially at critical times.
An audit of your digital activities, similar to a time audit, is highly recommended. For a two week period, note what sites you went to, what you read, what time you went to the site and for how long you stayed on each site. It isn’t important to note down to the minute and each site you visited, but it is important to see if there are any patterns that develop. Yes, spending two hours on Wikipedia with fifty tabs does happen on occasion. However, you might find yourself wasting ninety minutes a day on FarmVille or reading CNN comments for hours on end. As you are aware of this, consciously determine if the time spent is worth it to your mental and digital health. If not, work to eliminate the sources from your life.
Sometimes it is worthwhile to turn off the access to the Internet or use programs to limit access. Corporations do this to limit possible bandwidth concerns and prevent employees from visiting undesirable sites. Similar programs and filters are available to limit your time or to block Web sites from being accessed. If it’s necessary, take the time to research and implement one.
It is also a good idea to remember to take time away from the Internet. More on this will be written in Step 5.
Let’s look at the second half of the signal-to-noise ratio: improving the quality of the information that is being taken in. Unfortunately, there are few tips that I can suggest that are general in nature.
First, consider using your social network to ask for more information. Often times I will ask “the cloud” on Twitter if they have any recommendations. I’m frequently surprised at the results. Also remember to contribute to your networks as well, as they will help you in kind.
Second, become really good at using a search engine. Most people will just start tying a phrase into Google and what Google thinks is the most relevant results will come up in real-time. However, by adding switches or using the “Advanced Search” feature, you may be able to narrow down to what you are looking for faster. This is important in a world where more content is being generated on a daily basis, and frequently used words are either being optimized for the search engines or have millions of results.
Third, don’t be afraid to use the references from other Web sites to get more information. A good quality content provider will provide references to what they are reading and the research being used. This is similar to asking a massage therapist or a yoga teacher who they use for their services. It’s important to support who you regularly go to as well as understand who and what influenced them.
One important thing to note regarding signal: It’s very, very important to note that improving the signal and quality of digital content you take in is not the same as acquiring more signal and content. It is always relevant to consider and use the minimalism framework religiously in your interactions with your digital bodymind. If you end up with twenty or thirty resources for a given project, do not feel bad if you only use six or seven. There is no need to follow or use all of the resources found in research.
In this step we have discussed the use of some social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, how e-mail can be reduced, and how to reduce and improve the quality of your digital intake. However, that is half of what Everett is actively advising we do. In order to have a second self take care of us, we need to construct it. The next step discusses this in some detail.