Low Information Diet and Creativity, Part 3

This post could also be entitled, “where the hell have you been?”

In a classic case of an experiment taking an unexpected turn, my low information diet had some unintended consequences. In my last post, I mentioned how reducing my information intake freed up my time, but didn’t affect my creativity. It appears that I need to add a caveat to that. While cutting out information consumption didn’t reduce inspiration for writing, it did remove motivation to post to the blog.

I didn’t take into account that posting on the internet is a largely social exercise. I post to my blog, I read others’ blogs, it becomes a disjointed and dysfunctional dialog, but a dialog nonetheless. Remove the reading of others’ blogs and my own blog becomes me talking into space, and there simply isn’t a whole lot of motivation for me to talk into space. The end result was an extended period of time without a post.

This becomes a vicious circle, though, because the blog was my method of accountability for my writing. I updated my progress on the stories, by posting to the blog. Remove the blog, and you remove the accountability. Remove the accountability, and the whole experiment falls apart.

And so it did.

This extended hiatus has obviously hurt the end goal of making it to 52 short stories in a single year, but I’m going to keep plugging away and see just how far I get. Maybe I’ll extend the experiment at the end of the year, maybe I’ll just see how far I got. Either way, the writing won’t stop, and the low information diet has taught me a few things that I’m going to take away from it.

In no particular order, here are the lessons I’ve learned:

1) I don’t miss a lot of the content I used to read daily
2) Despite no longer subscribing to multiple news feeds, and not having cable TV, I’m still capable of feeling well-informed about the world around me. Yes, information is just that prevalent
3) People read this blog, and they complain when I don’t update. It’s touching, really.
4) A blog’s traffic will not die even if you neglect to post for a while.

Also, based on some of those learnings, and on some realizations I came to during the hiatus, there are a few things that will be changing on this blog. Again, in no particular order, here they are:

a) Less time spent on formatting. Pictures might be pretty, and bolded words might draw the eye, but I want people to read this for the content, not for the imagery, and the effort involved in finding those pictures isn’t worth the return, and I think my readers are smart enough to pick out the important bits without me highlighting them for them.
b) I need to be less preachy. I re-read some of my previous posts and realized that they were coming off stiff and preachy. I don’t talk like that in real life, so why am I writing like that? Going forward, I need to figure out how to start writing in my own voice.
c) This is going to get ecclectic. There are a lot of topics that are tangentially related to writing and creating. In fact, just about everything is. I need to take advantage of that fact more.

Overall, the low information diet was a great learning experience, and I’d recommend it to anyone who wants to simply his/her life. At worst, you end up with too much spare time on your hands. At best, you end up re-evaluating and prioritizing.