Our culture has excised from it’s rulebook the idea of “downtime.” Push email, ubiquitous mobile phones, always on connections and cheap laptops have made it so easy for us to stay connected all the time, that it seems almost irresponsible not to. Being effective at what you do is realizing that you have to be willing to close the information pipe.

No matter what you do, information retrieval is only the first half of your job. The other half is information processing, and that is best done by separating yourself from the information you are trying to process. By getting a new perspective.

Do yourself a favor today and cutoff the information pipeline. Do something random that you have been putting off, and try to gain some perspective from something other than the information stream. Chances are good, that sticky problem you have been staring at all day will look just a little easier when you get back.

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