Information Overload

May 1st, 2006 • General

Creating Passionate Users has it again. An exciting article about information overload.

I know exactly what Kathy’s talking about. I had a collection of almost 900 bookmarks marked “toread”! I kept (and cherished) it day to day for six or seven months promising myself that I’ll get back to it; I never did.

My biggest relieve came one day when I did three things, and I honestly think everybody should do this at least once a year, feels great:

1. Mark all your emails as read, don’t go over them one by one, mark ‘em all and throw ‘em in the attic. Don’t categorize, don’t touch, do nothing. If something’s really important, then whoever emailed you will send you a reminder.
2. Go over your feed list and delete all feeds that have more than 10-15 daily entries. I stopped keeping up with The Register because of this. Keep up with more blogs and less news sites, interesting news automatically trickles through blogs, the opposite doesn’t work.
3. Delete your bookmarks! Yes, all of them. You heard me. Zap them. Throw them to the sharks. Feed them to the poisonous flesh-eating gut-ripping blood-sucking mad dogs. Ok, maybe that was a bit over the edge. But trust me, Google is your friend, you’ll never come back to those bookmarks again (fine, except maybe for del.icio.us stuff).

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