Author Clay Johnson finished his new book, The Information Diet, after a month of intense focus. The “super secret weapon” that got him to done? Slow bandwidth.
Picture by Michael Coghlan
Johnson wrote his book away from civilisation, tethered to a bad connection on an already slow EDGE network, and in the process learned to love the productivity uptick that resulted from slowing his broadband mainline to a slow data drip. Here’s how he did it:
As soon as I got back to civilisation, I tried to find ways to emulate that slow bandwidth. There are a lot of new tools available for slowing down your bandwidth. This discussion on HackerNews. There’s Slowly App ($3.99 USD, OS X) that sits in your menu-bar and allows you to throttle your bandwidth whenever you’d like. For the OS X proficient and those with the free OS X Developer Tools, there’s also Network Link Conditioner which does the same thing. On Windows, there’s NetLimiter, and the cross platform charlesproxy for those of you on Linux.
Hit up the full post for details, and if you like the cut of his jib, Johnson’s book is available for pre-order.
Slow Your Bandwidth to Increase Your Focus [The Information Diet]
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