Books I've Read This Week

The Information Diet by Clay Johnson is exactly the type of book I needed to read after my new year's resolutions. I knew that I needed to curb the amount of information that I was consuming on a daily basis but I needed some strategies in order to accomplish it. Reading The Information Diet put me in touch with the tools and techniques I needed to make this change. I've been using RescueTime to track how my day is spent and make changes. After a couple of weeks of using the tool I realize that I'm less productive in the mornings than I am in the afternoon. This is not a surprise to me as I am Night Owl and not a Morning Lark. However, I'm making looking to make a change in my behaviour so I start everyday as a producer and not a consumer. This means the last thing I do before leaving work each day will be to setup a task I can tackle the following morning before I read my email or answer any StackOverflow questions. Besides making me more productive the book was a very enjoyable read. Particularly the section dealing with how news agencies prey on our confirmation bias in order to get us to keep consuming their brand of news. The book is also very digestible as it uses compares the consumption of information to our consumption of food. Johnson is able to make comparables between the consumption of bad food and it's effects on our bodies and the consumption of bad information and it's effects on our minds. Here's the books trailer:

See you next Friday.