#offscreenmag

Offscreen magazine have remade our “It’s ok to…” poster for their latest issue. 

Jason Fried is CEO of Basecamp and one of the web's most influencing personalities. The latest issue of Offscreen Magazine brings an extensive interview with Jason on which, at some point, he says this (emphasis mine):

I've stopped paying attention to the rest of the tech world. It' been about a year since I regularly read any industry news, be it Hacker News or TechCrunch. I no longer follow people on Twitter who opine about our industry. I find it all a great distraction, and I'm measurably happier for turning it out. Trying to keep up with the latest little everything caused me a great deal of anxiety over the years. And it wasn't until I stopped that I realised just how unhealthy it was.

Reading this alone was enough to justify the price of the magazine. First because it's exactly what I think. Being obsessed with the lastest news about technology, design, photography and several other subjects only causes me anxiety. And that anxiety is unhealthy. I've tried several times to reduce my information consumption, but I end up going back to trying to read everything.

On the other hand, it seems notable that the CEO of a technology company can afford to ignore the rest of the industry and still have a prosper company, which is admired by many. I have no doubts that much of the success of Basecamp comes from this ability of Jason to focus on his business and on what is important, without being influenced by what surrounds him.

For several years now I've been trying to read less news and small articles, and read more longform pieces of text that take time to absorb and make me think. We are loosing the ability to concentrate on reading and reflecting about longer forms of text, be it in-depth reports, magazine articles or books, and we only have to blame Facebook, Twitter and all those forms of consuming information in little pieces. I recently read an article about this, which basicaly says that reading news is a waste of time.

I leave you with two interesting links about Jason Fried and Basecamp:

Jason Fried - Jason Fried's articles on Medium.