In this post, we want to write about what we learned from the past two prototype releases, talk about the next version of Skim.Me, and discuss an additional surprise at the end.

Three weeks ago we sent invites out to another 200 potential users. Here’s how it went compared to Experimental Release #1:

Not the direction anyone wants to be headed. Interestingly enough, the emails were sent around the same time (8pm EST) on the same day of the week (Thursday). The only difference is we changed the subject line from “Skim.Me Invite – Keep up online more easily or replace iGoogle” to “Skim.Me Invite – Maximize your time spent browsing. Replace iGoogle or Google Reader.” Sick A/B test brah! But seriously, subject lines matter – though they don’t account for all the changes in open rate obviously. *Mailchimp open rates are not 100% accurate either.

It’s crazy that we had exactly 100 users get through the setup funnel in these two experiments. Well, it’s not really crazy but anytime you randomly get a number like that it’s more interesting for some reason. Just like when I spend exactly $XX.00 at the grocery store then I feel like the man. Enough rambling, the big takeaway that’s not depicted in the chart above is that engagement and retention aren’t great. From those 100 new users, we get around 10 of them coming back at least once a week. This isn’t horrible – Fred Wilson gets 10% to 25% retention (http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2013/02/retention-on-avc.html) – but it’s not awesome. To us, it means the product is usable but not that sticky. Not 10X better in buzzwordy startup terms. I know this is a small sample set but from the feedback we’ve gotten and from our gut, we feel we didn’t CRUSH IT (hate that phrase too) so we’re gonna make more tweaks.

We’ll know we’re on to something when we’ve had a few releases where DAILY (instead of weekly) retention is say 50% or more. 1 in 10 of our new users will come back to Skim.Me every week right now. We’re on to something when 5+ of every 10 new users are coming back every single day. Where do we get these benchmark numbers? Well, we were just actually guessing from intuition and, as is the case with many things on the Internet, you can find evidence (http://blog.flurry.com/bid/90743/App-Engagement-The-Matrix-Reloaded) to support any case you want supported. In reality, Flurry is a credible source so we’re happy that our thinking is in-line with their average of 5 users per week and 50% retention over 90 days for “news” apps.

That’s a brief summary of what we’ve learned. So what are we doing about it? A few pretty dramatic things:

1) We’re changing the product to make it easier to quickly skim what matters so you can decide what info to spend more time with. This has been the main insight from most of the feedback. The next version will not even look, feel or behave the same.

2) We’re redesigning the app to be responsive so it will work on laptops, tablets, and mobile phones right now. For a number of previous reasons, we had a laptop first/only strategy – all the while understanding we’d need to get on other devices quickly. There’s a reason Flurry only studies mobile analytics – we all know that is where most of the user growth, engagement, and retention will come from now and in the future.

3) We’re also taking a labs approach and building a complementary product called Nudge. We aren’t saying what Nudge does yet but this quote will give you an idea:

“I think that if I could change one thing about productivity apps per se, I would make them more focused on helping people to be effective, i.e., to do the right things as opposed to being efficient, which is simply doing things faster which does not automatically make something important. The problem is that it’s much harder to help with the former than the latter. But there are some great apps that build awareness of how you use time and they are in and of themselves oftentimes as important as apps that attempt to train you to use your time more intelligently.” – Tim Ferriss from TheNextWeb (http://thenextweb.com/voice/2013/02/19/a-chat-with-our-first-speaker-for-tnw-conference-2013-tim-ferriss-leader-of-the-cult-of-productivity/)

If Skim.Me is all about making your time online more efficient, Nudge is about helping you be more effective. We’ve been thinking about both problems and rather than build something that tackles both, we’re going to tackle each separately for now. Who knows, maybe they converge in the future.

That’s all we have for now. Thanks for sticking around with us and we’re really looking forward to the next release(s).

In this post, we want to write about what we learned from the past two prototype releases, talk about the next version of Skim.Me, and discuss an additional surprise at the end.

Three weeks ago we sent invites out to another 200 potential users. Here’s how it went compared to Experimental Release #1:

Not the direction anyone wants to be headed. Interestingly enough, the emails were sent around the same time (8pm EST) on the same day of the week (Thursday). The only difference is we changed the subject line from “Skim.Me Invite – Keep up online more easily or replace iGoogle” to “Skim.Me Invite – Maximize your time spent browsing. Replace iGoogle or Google Reader.” Sick A/B test brah! But seriously, subject lines matter – though they don’t account for all the changes in open rate obviously. *Mailchimp open rates are not 100% accurate either.

It’s crazy that we had exactly 100 users get through the setup funnel in these two experiments. Well, it’s not really crazy but anytime you randomly get a number like that it’s more interesting for some reason. Just like when I spend exactly $XX.00 at the grocery store then I feel like the man. Enough rambling, the big takeaway that’s not depicted in the chart above is that engagement and retention aren’t great. From those 100 new users, we get around 10 of them coming back at least once a week. This isn’t horrible – Fred Wilson gets 10% to 25% retention (http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2013/02/retention-on-avc.html) – but it’s not awesome. To us, it means the product is usable but not that sticky. Not 10X better in buzzwordy startup terms. I know this is a small sample set but from the feedback we’ve gotten and from our gut, we feel we didn’t CRUSH IT (hate that phrase too) so we’re gonna make more tweaks.

We’ll know we’re on to something when we’ve had a few releases where DAILY (instead of weekly) retention is say 50% or more. 1 in 10 of our new users will come back to Skim.Me every week right now. We’re on to something when 5+ of every 10 new users are coming back every single day. Where do we get these benchmark numbers? Well, we were just actually guessing from intuition and, as is the case with many things on the Internet, you can find evidence (http://blog.flurry.com/bid/90743/App-Engagement-The-Matrix-Reloaded) to support any case you want supported. In reality, Flurry is a credible source so we’re happy that our thinking is in-line with their average of 5 users per week and 50% retention over 90 days for “news” apps.

That’s a brief summary of what we’ve learned. So what are we doing about it? A few pretty dramatic things:

1) We’re changing the product to make it easier to quickly skim what matters so you can decide what info to spend more time with. This has been the main insight from most of the feedback. The next version will not even look, feel or behave the same.

2) We’re redesigning the app to be responsive so it will work on laptops, tablets, and mobile phones right now. For a number of previous reasons, we had a laptop first/only strategy – all the while understanding we’d need to get on other devices quickly. There’s a reason Flurry only studies mobile analytics – we all know that is where most of the user growth, engagement, and retention will come from now and in the future.

3) We’re also taking a labs approach and building a complementary product called Nudge. We aren’t saying what Nudge does yet but this quote will give you an idea:

“I think that if I could change one thing about productivity apps per se, I would make them more focused on helping people to be effective, i.e., to do the right things as opposed to being efficient, which is simply doing things faster which does not automatically make something important. The problem is that it’s much harder to help with the former than the latter. But there are some great apps that build awareness of how you use time and they are in and of themselves oftentimes as important as apps that attempt to train you to use your time more intelligently.” – Tim Ferriss from TheNextWeb (http://thenextweb.com/voice/2013/02/19/a-chat-with-our-first-speaker-for-tnw-conference-2013-tim-ferriss-leader-of-the-cult-of-productivity/)

If Skim.Me is all about making your time online more efficient, Nudge is about helping you be more effective. We’ve been thinking about both problems and rather than build something that tackles both, we’re going to tackle each separately for now. Who knows, maybe they converge in the future.

That’s all we have for now. Thanks for sticking around with us and we’re really looking forward to the next release(s).

Skim.me is all about helping people obtain healthier online habits. We want to help everyone be more productive, and we’re turning to behavioral psychology to do it. Before I explain how, I’m going back to economics for a moment.

Cass Sunstein has been a long-time key advisor to President Obama (who also comes out of the University of Chicago), and although he left the White House this summer, his ideas played an important part in the 2009 stimulus bill. They discovered that tax rebate checks, the stimulus method Bush tried at the end of his term in 2008 in order to prevent the recession, were having no economic effect, because people were depositing the checks into their savings accounts instead of spending them. They also determined that cutting taxes by reducing the amount withheld from payroll would be invisible and therefore result in increased consumer spending; nobody would realize that their taxes had been cut and that their savings should go up. It worked as expected: people just assumed they hadn’t been spending as much as usual, and spent more as a result. These “invisible tax cuts” made up a major part of the stimulus, and probably prevented a much deeper recession.

Part of the reason you spend so much time online is because that spending is invisible. At Skim.Me, we show you how much time you spend and how many visits you make in a gauge that encourages moderation. By making these things visible, it encourages you to save time rather than spend it. We want to “nudge” you towards healthy, moderate, balanced online habits, so you can be more productive and have more free time.

Source: http://www.howard-insurance.com/differentiation

READING TIME: 2 mins 55 secs

During my morning catch up session last week, I came across a Pando Daily post on Rockmelt and the company’s latest release of a re-imagined browser for the iPad. If you don’t know who they are, you can checkout the article. From my 30,000 foot view, it seems like they are a solid team that raised $40M three years ago to make the browser itself more social with Facebook and Twitter integration. Now after a few years, they’ve released an iPad version of their “browser” that, to me, is reminiscent of the social magazines and aggregators out there like Pulse, Flipboard, Scoop.It, Trap.It, Flud, Thirst, Feedly, Google Currents and whoever else is still around. That list was rattled off the top of my head, which partially identifies the problem.

The product seems nice and I think the design looks great, mostly because Skim.Me has a similar interface. In fact, most of the companies in the space have a similar interface because of the trailblazing design efforts of Flipboard, Pinterest and Pulse (I know others came before that tried). Herein lies the problem - everyone is doing the same thing with minor differences. There’s no real differentiation and because of that the top two players in the market (Flipboard and Pulse) dominate the market share. For Skim, we Daren recognized at the beginning of this year that we were basically headed down the same path as what Rockmelt just released.

But it’s hard not to go down this path, especially when you see what’s working for others. While new designs and user experiences are definite differentiators, they only matter in this case if you’re the first mover or maybe the first to follow. After that, there’s just not much sustainable value by building something only marginally different. Another layer of complexity is actually figuring out what is marginally different. Internally for a team, something could be thought of as revolutionary but  seen as marginal when released. This is part of the reason why startups are encouraged to get outside their own brain to speak with people who might use the potential product.

Unfortunately, I don’t think Rockmelt is going to have a successful outcome of the magnitude they want. At least not with this product. They seem super smart and talented so I’m sure they’ll figure something out but I see them making the same mistakes Skim.Me made on a smaller scale. We believe a lot in what they’re pitching – that there’s a shift toward visual navigation because of the iPad. That’s exactly why we designed Skim.Me the way we did for the computer web but I don’t think it’s enough to differentiate in the consumer’s mind. Graphical interfaces, gesture based navigation, interest-based curation, and recommendations are great things that we love too but I honestly think no one really cares yet outside the tech community because no one gets what the terms mean for their lives.

We started thinking about differentiating around productivity and healthier browsing habits after reading Tim Ferriss’ blog but the true necessity of differentiation didn’t really get solidified in our minds until I met Pete Asbill from Songza. If you haven’t downloaded Songza, check it out. It has replaced Pandora for my “What to Listen to at Work” and “What to Listen to While I Work Out” life tasks that I need completed daily (as a corollary, Skim is replacing how you catch up online). Pete met me off a weak intro, so basically cold, and talked about Skim with me for an hour. Later that day, he asked me for my address and a few days later came this book in the mail. It is an easy read all about differentiation – something Songza took to heart. We hope Songza’s popularity is the next stop on the Skim train but I can already tell you that without thinking about differentiation we’d already be headed down the wrong tracks.

Update: From further Rockmelt research, it’s ironic from our standpoint that  TechCrunch writes:

There is still the philosophical question of whether a tool that helps us seek out and consume more content will actually make us happier. Quick hits seem to deepen our addiction to information rather than satisfy us. But Vishria was quick to retort that RockMelt doesn’t necessarily aid procrastination. By making consumption more efficient he thinks we might get our fix and get back to work.

The writer will be getting a Skim.Me invite

Update 2: Yesterday the former found of Netvibes pivoted for the 2nd or 3rd time back to something that closely resembles iGoogle/NetVibes + Dropbox. Maybe those of you who’ve signed up for our service seeking a pure iGoogle replacement can give it a shot. Like Rockmelt, I think they’ll have long-term issues on this track.

Source: http://tirl.org/software/digitaldetox/

READING TIME: 1 min 45 seconds

High-tech, low-tech, and now no-tech. A recent rant post by Sarah Perez brings up some interesting points on what she terms disconnect porn – society’s current fascination with a disconnected world. Her stream of consciousness touches on our “obligations to connectivity” and search for the mirage of tech/life balance. She concludes that many of us want an off switch now or at least ways to do what we currently do in a less-connected manner.

This all obviously goes along with where we think the world is headed but the bigger question for all of us is whether or not we actually care versus just saying we care. Are we only fascinated because the idea is aspirationally appealing? It’s kind of like knowing we should save money, work out, and call our Mom – it doesn’t always happen because it’s just easier to buy the shoes, eat the pizza, or veg out watching Bravo. Mentally, it’s just easier to give in to our urges rather than take the energy to fight them. As an example, I have a new chat notification bouncing on my screen right now and it’s taking every ounce of my soul not to three-finger swipe right and check it out. I’d be more productive if I weren’t signed in but then I wouldn’t be able to feel in constant contact with my fiancee.

So what is it that will actually make us care enough to disconnect or impose limitations? Is it being diagnosed with Internet-Use disorder or getting fired at work for excessive social media use? People always tell me they want to spend less time on Facebook or Twitter but few ever actually do anything about it. Maybe constantly hearing about it in the media will drive disconnecting to become suddenly en vogue (Sarah says we’re already there). Or maybe it’s a shift in how technology is viewed in the workplace because,  let’s be honest, what’s going on these days is similar to every employee “working” while also constantly watching television. There’s only so much you can firewall.

The current corporate culture says we shouldn’t really care. Just hire productive rockstars who manage themselves and their time. They GSD and you don’t have to worry about them constantly checking Facebook, Twitter, email, ESPN, news and stock quotes all day. Outside of work, where we don’t need to monitor our digital intake for productivity but rather for overall health, will people care about disconnected, slow web solutions even if we build them? From the post, it looks like at least a growing amount of the population will care but we’re about to really find out.

Source: http://startupquote.com/post/855482768

READING TIME: 2.5 mins

It’s been over three weeks since we sent our first prototype to ~150 of the ~1500 of you that have signed up. If being embarrassed by your product means going into a shell of silence post-release then we qualify as sufficiently embarrassed.

Of the ~150 invites we sent out to mostly friends & family, ~100 people opened the email and 24 ended up downloading the Chrome or Firefox extension.  After filtering all the feedback and two weeks of psychological product/market searching within the team (similar to soul searching), we’ve decided:

1) our experience is currently unreliable & unstable

We’re asking the client-side to process a lot but we didn’t anticipate the variability of the experiences. For many of you, installing the extension was a big problem area. Others just didn’t have much browsing data to use to set things up. Those who had enough data, quite honestly, weren’t always satisfied with the sources that the algorithms setup. Even worse, some of you couldn’t make changes for 24 hours because we had to allow time for other personalization algorithms to run.

Solution: First, we’ve brought on some awesome engineers to help us with usability, performance and our entire development process but we’re always recruiting. We built a lot of crap really fast and now we need help cleaning it up or redoing it . Second, less dependency on algorithms and more user input. Multiple options to get setup: use the extension, import settings from iGoogle/Reader, or manually add sources (no more waiting 24 hours). Immediately customize which sources to “Catch Up” on when you visit. We’ll learn browsing patterns within the batch, if any exist, and adjust accordingly throughout the day.

2) to simplify what we’re building.

A Done list and To-Do list for browsing? What were we thinking? A lot of you didn’t really get it.

Solution: How about we just give you a sidebar with a list of sources that you’ve chosen to keep up with. How about that sidebar is limited to 10 sources max plus your calendar, weather, and other things we integrate? These are sources you check basically every single day. We mentioned above that we’re changing the morning/afternoon/evening browsing batches to two batches: “Catch Up” and “Distract Me.” We think mood-based batches better captures variations in browsing than just time of day. We can treat time of day as a secondary modifier.

**HOLY SH!T WE JUST GOT INTO AN ACCELERATOR AS I’M WRITING THIS! This is an amazing program made up of VCs, angels, and tech entrepreneurs. We got in with serious help from some entrepreneurs and investors so THANK YOU! Will write more on this when public.

Source: http://www.qbn.com/topics/676297/

3) to trade short-term positive reinforcement for long-term potential 

We’ve gotten 90%+ of our signups from users looking for an alternative to iGoogle. We think we can add value for some of you iGooglers but we’ve also made the decision not to just recreate a personalized dashboard with widgets. To us, that would be appalling in design and experience. Not only that, but it’s just not defensible in the long-term. Skim.Me is a completely different experience. Functionally, we will have most of the info you want all in one place. The problem with that as a unique value proposition is that you can also get that with most of our competitors who’ve had a head start or one of the old startpage holdovers.

To survive in the long-term we have to do things that no other intelligent personalized aggregator would ever do. None of our competitors truly want you to spend less time with them or check their app/site less frequently throughout the day – they want you to compulsively check back for new content. We are promoting the opposite for the long-term. Have a full info meal with us to catch up or relax. Then go do something else. Do this only a few times per day.

Inspired by Ryan Carson’s post about his workday as CEO of Treehouse, I want to give you a glimpse into my work-in-progress day at Skim.Me. For background, I am naturally (or nuture-ally) a night owl. I don’t know if it’s because of the way my body is programmed or because I just haven’t adjusted from staying up until 2am-5am during my college years but it’s definitely a tough transition that I know many others want to take steps towards.

I used to be of the mindset that I should optimize along my own biorhythms and make my night owlness a productive strength instead of an overhanging weakness. While I believe this in theory, it’s just not practical in many situations – especially when you prioritize other things in life like family and/or children. For me, this startup is very important to me but not more than my relationship with Meg, so working from 9pm to 3am while at home was just not sustainable long-term. Yes, I believe that you get out what you put in but that doesn’t mean the all-night hacker is the only way to do it. Plus, the other three members of our team (all engineers – I am not) fill that role well.

Here’s a rough schedule I’ve been using as a guideline for the past couple months:

Wake Up – 6:28am
Appreciate the Day – 6:28am to 6:30am
Morning Skim – 6:30am to 7:00am
Eat – 7:00am to 7:20am
Morning Email – 7:20am to 7:50am
Hangout w/ Meg – 7:50am to 8:15am
Workout – 8:15am to 9:15am
Get Ready / Go to Office – 9:15am to 10:30am
Game Plan – 10:30am to 11:00am
Be Productive – 11:00am to 12:30pm
Daily Engineering Convo – 12:30pm to 1:30pm
Be Productive – 1:30pm to 3:00pm
Lunch – 3:00pm to 3:15pm
Afternoon Skim & Email – 3:15pm to 4:00pm
Be Productive – 4:00pm to 6:00pm
Cook & Eat – 6:00pm to 7:00pm
Work/Hangout/Other – 7:00pm to 10:00pm
Night Skim & Email – 10:00pm to 10:30pm
Bed – 10:45pm

A few things:

- “Being productive” can have many definitions. So can “doing work”. How I see it is that I try to get 2-3 meaningful things done per day that will help this startup get off the ground. I try to block out everything else during those 5 or so hours but I “work” more than that. Things like game planning, the daily meeting, email, industry news reading, etc. fall into the work bucket.

- This is just a guideline and many things have +/- 20 mins of underage or overage. The only thing set in stone is the daily engineering talk but that sometimes gets moved if people are deep into working on something. We’re experimenting with the best time to have this since the other team members get up around 11am.

- You can see I am moving towards batching my browsing (using Skim.Me duh) and email so I’m not constantly checking sites or looking at incoming emails. It’s hard and sometimes I get the itch and just check. But it definitely has helped me GTD. Again, all a work-in-progress.

- I’m finishing up school part-time (MBA boooo) so I go to class twice a week from 6pm to 9pm. Those days I don’t cook.

- I need 7 hours of sleep to function at my best. I can do 6 but only for a few days. The hardest thing to do is shut it down and get into bed. It takes me another 20-40 mins to actually fall asleep. Just last night my night skim extended to 11pm – the Olympics don’t help either – but I cut it off, got in bed and was up at 6:14am.

- Getting to bed is doubly hard if you actually have some sort of social life. Mine is slowly fading into oblivion but I never stay out late on weekdays anymore. Once in awhile on the weekends and sometimes that affects how I feel during the week. Sacrifices.

- To that end, I’ve started to notice that my most productive days are Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. I wake up usually without an alarm on those days and have full energy throughout the day. Monday and Tuesday are more of a struggle sometimes because of the weekend blues or traveling.

- Going from working out at night to working out in the morning is tough. My body doesn’t like it and doesn’t perform nearly as well as it does later in the day. I always feel like I’m still waking up in the gym but always feel great and energized after. Sometimes I just skip the gym and do yoga – trying that on Wednesdays.

- We work out of the office three days a week and from home two days a week.

- I try to schedule meetings on days I’m working from home and during the “Be Productive” slots.

That’s pretty much it. I’m human and sometimes go off the wire but it’s nice to have a guiding light to bring me back. Eventually, I’d like to move my wake up time earlier and earlier. I’m starting to enjoy the morning for many of the same reasons I used to enjoy the late night – it’s quiet, with less distractions.

What’s your daily schedule like? Any tips for me?

By the way, “Good Time” by Carly Rae Jepson featuring Owl City is the best song out right now.

Yes, there are two titles to this post. A month ago I didn’t know what SEO was (not true) but now I do thanks to this and this. I don’t care though cause the people who search for iGoogle alternatives like Netvibes, Protopages, uStart, Pageflakes, Symbo something and all the other god awful dashboards need to see this.

iGoogle sucks. I don’t get why so many people love it and are crying about the fact that Google is shutting it down next November. I can’t believe they’re not shutting it down earlier! There’s even a petition going around trying to gather 5mm signatures to save the dinosaur.

Look, I’m not saying that the page isn’t functional. It’s a dashboard of widgets that shows everything you want to see on the web in one place. The problem is, it came out seven years ago when I graduated college (wow has it been that long). A lot has changed in seven years on the web and the overall experience across devices is just not up to par…but people don’t seem to know or care what they’re missing. Can’t convert everyone and make them happy.

I know habits are tough to change but Google pulling this product is the best thing that could happen to you iGoogle users. It gives you the chance to build a new habit and try something new. Don’t mess that chance up and find a dashboard alternative like the ones mentioned above or anywhere else on the first page of google search. Embrace the new design, interfaces, and experiences that have been made possible with the advent of HTML5, CSS3, WebGL and more.

Anything can be your start page these days. Yeah, I want you to use Skim.Me but I’d still be happy if you went from iGoogle to Flipboard, Pulse, Zite or the slew of other better ways to consume the web. Heck, most people’s start page is their inbox or Facebook/Twitter/Pinterest accounts. There are many other ways to aggregate and consume your favorite sites and apps in one place.  You can’t get through it all anyways so you might as well visually and emotionally enjoy the experience while you’re actually browsing.

Thoughts?

Source: http://benheine.deviantart.com/art/Over-Consumption-75971042

We met with one of our advisors last week two weeks ago and he was telling us how overconsumption and information overload were problems back in 1994 when he worked at Apple. If these problems existed back then, can you imagine what some people feel like today – 18 years later?  Social media wasn’t even around back then.

So here are a few ways to tell you have no self control when it comes to consuming digital information. I suffer from all of these myself. That’s where the list comes from.

1. Phone is the First Thing You Check 

I habitually check my phone when I first wake up. Most people rollover and grab their phone on the nightstand, but I put it away from my bed so I have to get up to get it. My routine is Twitter then email. I check Twitter until Seth Godin’s morning post. That’s my cue to stop but I bet most people don’t have a mechanism to stop. Usually it’s probably, “Look at the time! I have to get ready for work now!” Stuff I find on Twitter that’s too long to read gets emailed to myself to read on my computer.

2. Open Tabs &  Refresh

We’re all guilty of it. Everyone has open tabs and some in multiple browser windows. Right now I have 35 tabs open in two different browsers (Chrome and Safari). Sadly, I don’t even consume information from most of these tabs on any given day. They’re just there for comfort in case one day I want to get to them. My safety blanket. The sites I do consume from I’m constantly checking by typing in the URL. I don’t leave the tab open because I think it’s distracting even though I type in the URL to check for new items every few hours so I feel caught up.

3. Boredom
4. Procrastination

Boredom and procrastination are loosely tied together. I check my phone constantly when I’m bored. That includes in the bathroom, working out, waiting for the elevator, walking down the street, preloading things to read in the subway, and when my fiancee’s shopping. This is terrible. Likewise, when I’m writing a blog post like this, I often swipe from this Safari browser to my Chrome browser to see if anyone’s emailed me.

5. Type A Neurotic Routine Follower 

All these habits, good or bad, create routines that my brain is trained to crave. During the week, when I don’t check Twitter and remember that I didn’t check it I get a negative feeling of anxiety and an urge to check that as browsed – same with when I’ve been away from Facebook for too long. By then it’s later in the day, so to get back to Seth Godin’s morning tweet takes a long time unless I skip some tweets and start at an arbitrary earlier time. Both actions (skipping down arbitrarily or just taking the time to get back down to Seth Godin’s tweet) make me feel overwhelmed. Many people we’ve spoken to have said that this is the same feeling they get when they use most RSS readers.

This isn’t to say that these routines are breakable or alterable. I used to wake up, check my 17 inch, 9 pound Dell computer by opening up Firefox and clicking through favorite bookmarks. Some of those sites I used to love to check never made it into my phone routines or computer routines. I also used to check Twitter more than once a day but it became unmanageable and unproductive for me to jump in and out. In other words I didn’t have the self-control to limit my twitter browsing. Now I only go there during the day to post stuff.

What are your digital consumption routines like? What do you want to change? Maybe we can help.

Postscript: Great post by Nir Eyal on the need for antibodies to addictive habits associated with digital consumption. Also, just found out that Newsweek’s cover story is about the Internet Making us crazy. We’ll be talking about that more here.

The result: an avalanche of crap tailored specifically to our interests, likes, and dislikes. Now, instead of more time, we have even less. Is there an answer? We believe there is.

But it requires asking a different question.

You probably visit many sites each day. Blogs, news, banking, and a whole lot more. We all know these things take up time, but what is that time really spent on? Actually looking at content? Only partially.

 ”There is an inescapable setup time for all tasks, large or minuscule in scale. It is often the same for one as it is for a hundred. There is a psychological switching of gears that can require up to 45 minutes to resume a major task that has been interrupted. More than a quarter of each 9-5 period (28%) is consumed by such interruptions.” Tim Ferriss, The 4 Hour Work Week, citing The Cost of Not Paying Attention by Jonathan Spira and Joshua Feintuch.

The better question to ask is probably, how do we free up that 28%?

If we realized how much of life is wasted on “setup times”, switching between tasks, typing URLs, remembering and navigating to the sections we want to look it, repeating things that could have waited (e.g. checking email constantly), and then mentally adjusting back into the zone when we go back to whatever we were doing before… it would blow our minds.

Fortunately, Tim Ferriss also gave us the answer:

“The cost and time effective solution, therefore, is to wait until you have a larger order, an approach called ‘batching’.”

If you group similar tasks together, the group only has one setup time. It also stops you from repeating tasks more often than you need to. Instead of checking your emails throughout the day, what if you checked twice a day, at 11 and 4? You can do the same with everything else online; is there really anything new on your favorite blog that can’t wait until the evening?

Use your imagination. Picture opening one site each morning, containing all the content from your entire online routine, one by one, in the right order. You could skim everything you were going to look at that day in a fraction of the time. Maybe you wouldn’t even be allowed to see anything new until you came back that afternoon.

Now, the only thing worse than being inefficient is wasting time becoming efficient. The site would need to learn your routine on its own, without any work, time, or effort on your part — not general likes and dislikes, but your existing patterns and behaviors. This may sound far-fetched, but just imagine it for a moment.

Food for thought: if the 28% percent figure is true, how would it affect us to have that time freed up? It might change our lives.