Five ways to conquer information overload
Last month, I complained that I was losing the RSS-feeds battle: I had more than 2,300 unread items in the queue, and the situation was rapidly getting worse.
Right now, I have 28 unread items.
My GMail account used to have hundreds of unread emails on any given day. Nowadays, I clear it daily.
Here are the techniques I used to conquer my information overload:
1. Commit to blazing through this stuff every day, without fail.
One of the things that kept happening to me was that I’d leave things unread that I wanted to devote more attention to. ‘I’ll go back to that when I really have the time to look at it,’ I thought. Of course, what ended up happening was that I had so many things to go back to that I never went back to them. In addition, I made the decision about what I wanted to devote more attention to with insufficient data—before I had even looked at the item in question. I had 300 email messages (mostly news-type messages), with no idea of the relevance of each one.
Today, I look at every email, quickly, to decide if I really want to pursue it further. Of course, a lot of them are irrelevant, and it’s amazing how easy, freeing, and gratifying it is to give something a glance and move on.
I do the same with Bloglines, especially with feeds like the New York Times that add items continually. Realistically, most of the NYT items aren’t directly relevant to me, and it feels a lot better to continually clear them out than to have that bold 200 unread items mocking me.
2. Unsubscribe from stuff that just isn’t working for you.
When I first started with Bloglines, I subscribed to everything, and it all seemed interesting. What I found, though, was that the effort involved to keep up with prolific sites like Engadget and Gizmodo outweighed the value I was getting from them. Don’t get me wrong; these sites are spectacular and worthwhile. They’re just too far outside my ‘relevance zone’ for me to spend the time reviewing them.
3. Have a strategy for how you’re going to follow up with the stuff you DO like.
I generally use Bloglines for a quick browse, for a flick through, for a summary overview. When I see something I want to comment on, or something worth blogging about, or something particularly relevant, I click on it to open it in a new tab. What happens is this: I spend 30 minutes racing through Bloglines and end up with 10 or so tabs to follow up on, a way better situation than not spending any time on Bloglines and having 1,500 unread items.
5. Make sure there’s some stuff in there you look forward to.
My daily Dilbert entices me to visit Bloglines on a regular basis. Once I’m there, I see all the unread items and that spurs me into action (see step 1). There are a couple of other feeds in there that are sheer joy as well, so it’s not only homework. This is a great help on the motivation side of things.
5. Accept the fact that you can’t know everything.
It’s a fact. Accept it.
What techniques do you use? Put them in the comments; if we get enough, I’ll compile them into a community post.
On a side note, this morning I got an email about the Macquarie Dictionary’s Word of the Year contest. I immediately clicked on it, and the first word I looked at was ‘infomania’: the tendency to give immediate attention to incoming messages such as email, text messages, etc., resulting in constant distraction and a corresponding drop in the recipient’s attention levels and work performance.
Boy did I feel stupid!
