Nevertheless, there's great value in slow. Going slower
makes you think faster. Slowing down can make you more productive. Slow works
but doesn't get enough credit.
My colleague Steve Rubel reminded me about being slow when he wrote about favoring "old school technology like newsletters in an age of too much." And this from a guy who consumes more information in a week than all of humanity produced from Year Zero to 1900.
If Steve Rubel can slow down, then so can I. Here are six ways to help you put on the mental brakes:
- Stop following people who update Twitter with banal observations about the music they're listening to "right now," or with where they checked in, or with "inside tweets" to fellow ego-driven douchebags of the socal mediasphere. Not that I feel strongly about this or anything...
- E-mail is not a medium designed for urgency, so stop checking your Blackberry every nanosecond. If something is truly urgent, go to your mobile device of choice and try out the "phone" App.
- Do as Steve suggests and subscribe to newsletter "digest" versions of your favorite blogs. An earthquake in Haiti is important and necessitates real-time coverage - Google Buzz or the latest eMarketer chart does not.
- Read a newspaper while you still can. In fact, take a day, turn off your feeds and consume news only from print and radio. Then see if you feel less informed or more aware of actual news that matters.
- Write something longer than 140 characters or even a few paragraphs. Give it a premise and a beginning, middle and end. And when you're done put it aside and come back to it a day or so later, and then edit the hell out of it. Finally, don't post it anywhere. Not everything needs to be shared.
- Most of all, don't believe blindly in the future. Believe in the past and trust your experience to make the future manageable, tolerable and, hopefully, more worthwhile.
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