I’ve been pondering on this for over a week now as it ties in with much of what I’ve been writing and thinking about for many years.

The low information diet is a neat phrase — and concept — used in Timothy Ferriss’s new book, The 4-Hour Workweek, which I reviewed here a couple of weeks ago. It also sings from the same hymn sheet as another book, Mediated — How the Media Shape Your World, which I also reviewed here some months since.

Information is the bane of our lives. It pursues us everywhere, via billboards and Blackberrys, cell phones and laptops. Information never stops, it seeps into our brains, jams out all useful activity and crashes any tendency to creativity. Most of it is useless, irrelevant, biassed, deceitful, deceptive and damaging to our health.

Do I like information? I love it. We all do. But, like alcohol and drugs, it’s monumentally counter-productive unless consumed in tiny doses at precisely the right time.

The problem is, information makes us feel important, connected, in league with “where it’s at”. If we don’t get any, we’re sure to look inadequate at the XYZ Conference. We never stop to think that the XYZ Conference is just another vehicle for more useless information, as is that so-vital podcast, video hookup or blog post (present post excepted because of its essential nature).

Ferriss’s chapter with the same title as this post is the best eight-page sequence in his book. Alone it will change your life. If you’re a Techmeme groupie or a news junkie — as I used to be — read it and learn about “selective ignorance” and the trial one-week media fast.

Refuse to be mediated, concentrate on that personal task in hand. Only your work and activity is worthy of your attention. Everything else may be relevant to others, but will kill your effectiveness and utility if you indulge in it.

There are many traps to watch out for too. I watched Ferriss being interviewed on the Scoble Show the other day hoping to discover whether the author’s wildly romantic CV had any truth in it and whether he did indeed work only four hours a week. Most of it was driven by Scoble’s interventions pushing some aspect of his own work methods. Unfortunately, it diverted the author onto narrow detail-driven paths that made his ideas seem trite. Like hiring someone in India to triage his email. Now I do know about hiring people to do simple tasks, like writing content, and believe me the time-overhead involved is usually much greater than doing the job yourself — especially if it’s triaging your email.

Outsourcing is rarely the answer because of the admin and the need to train the outsourcee. They will also require supervision to keep them up to standard, billing and paying, accounting and complimenting. It really is not as simple as Ferriss says.

So let’s stick with the low information diet. This is the nub of the matter. Get it right — depending on the source of your income stream — and all else follows.

Draw up a few relevancy charts. Redraw them onto one page and into one box. Eliminate anything even slightly superfluous. Concentrate ferociously on what’s left, but only to the extent that it serves your purpose, and you are beginning to see the light.

It is vain to do with more what can be done with less. William of Occam.

Take Occam’s Razor to everything you do and you won’t go far wrong. Not to do so is to cut your own throat.

Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking. Albert Einstein.

Update : Catch Timothy Ferriss on The Scoble Show.

Timothy Ferriss’s The 4-Hour Workweek is one of those business books that use counter-intuition as a badge of merit. Much of it is so batty and over-egged you wonder if you’re not wasting your time reading it.

And yet the core message is a powerful one, and it contains much food for thought for anyone stuck in a boring career, or running an ailing business.

The subtitle is, “Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich”.

New rich, or NR, is an important refrain throughout the book. And yes, acronyms abound. DEAL — D for Definition, E for Elimination, A for Automation, L for Liberation, makes for tiresome reading sometimes, as does the author’s CV.

Did author Timothy Ferriss really become national kickboxing champion of China by using a loophole in the rules allowing him to push his opponents out of the ring a few times to eliminate them from the competition? And if so, is that the way you want to run your life? Your call.

He also claims to have been a motorcycle racer in Europe, Argentine Tango champ in Buenos Aires, a scuba diver in Panama and a skier in the Andes. Oh, and a language teacher in Thailand and Japan and … much more. Bear in mind he’s only 29, or was when he wrote the book.

Well, maybe so, but these boasts don’t add much to his basic thesis. And thesis it is, for Ferriss is a very smart cookie. His main ideas, like the low-information diet (down with RSS), outsourcing the boring stuff, reducing work to what you do best, have much in common with the 80/20 principle, but go that extra mile to the very limits of absurdity. The brakes screech on at the last moment, though, and he avoids complete overturn — just. Maybe that’s his motor-racing experience coming through.

The book is also interestingly interactive. We’re referred to his website for the latest, or most detailed information. It’s a good way to drive traffic as those of us who advocate print/online synergy have been saying for a while. Be aware, he also embeds passwords in the text for the most intriguing documents online. This is a total tease, but one way of making sure you read the whole book.

By now you will have realized that Timothy Ferriss is a bit of a flamboyant sort of chap. While that may be the new blue in business book style, the main question for this reviewer is : does it contain enough meaty nuggets of new ideas and information to justify trawling through the whole book with umpteen visits to the website?

I would say, yes. It certainly made me rethink many of my lazy, received-wisdom notions about business … and even life. Wow, I didn’t think I was going to write the L word there. That’s what Ferriss does, he gets you branching out laterally in ways you never intended.

Whether any of his schemes will stick enough to actually change anything remains to be seen. I also have to say, that some of them appear to be marginally illegal, at least where I am. So, if you can’t afford a lawyer … well, I’m not one either, so I’m not going to advise you.

Judgement : I would emphatically recommend this book if you have a taste for the extraordinary and don’t mind flouting conventions and doing things “your way”. Of course, if you do ‘em his way, you may find yourself perched on a giant Ferris wheel unable to get off. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.