Over the weekend I read Bit Literacy, another how-to-get-things-done book. More on it later as I start to figure out what to implement, what works, etc. The author's central tenet, though, is "Let the bits go." A good chunk of the book is therefore given over to your media diet. What are you going to read / watch / listen to? What's OK to let go?

Internet-wise, outside of email and writing / maintaining this blog, the mainstay of my media diet is RSS feeds. (One of the things I thought Hurst could have said more about was the use of a good feed reader as a way to stay on your media diet, since it discourages surfing, but he thinks that RSS is for "techies" only.) Over a year ago I put a stake in the ground and said that my limit was 99 feeds. Today, I've moved the goal posts (in a good way) and cut back to 43 feeds. (Link goes to my list of feeds on bloglines, so if you need to check if you're still in there go ahead.) Why 43? In honor of 43 Folders, the lifehack site, which is named for the 43 folders in a Getting Things Done "tickler file" I talked about here.

Cutting down to 43 wasn't easy. I got rid of nearly all my music blogs. I currently have more music than I have time to actually listen to. And yet I found myself constantly downloading more singles, tagging them, rating them to see if I wanted to keep them, filing them, etc. The signal-to-work ratio was getting pretty low, and from a time management standpoint I've eliminated a big distraction right there.

Onward and upward!

M E-L posted this on June 18, 2007
It is filed under Blogs & Blogging, Community, Computers & Internet

It is also indexed with the following tags: RSS | GTD | Information Management | Bit Literacy |