Managing Information Overload

Way too much information everywhere is not here to stay, it is growing. New information is arriving every minute. It cannot be stopped so it must be managed or it will eat your time like a plague of locusts and spin your brain.

What Do You Really Need To Know?

The first step is to find out where the information you are getting is coming from then limit your exposure to what is not useful. Do you really need that many social networks? How much television do you watch? How many blogs, newspapers, books, news sites, are you at daily? You can live without some of this. You can gain a more productive and more satisfying life by cutting some of this out of your information diet.

I am taking a log of what I do after I did it online and will for the next 2 weeks. Much like keeping a log of what you spend daily to see where you waste money.Then I can see where I really waste time and get spun into to many directions. That is how information overload works. It is to a great extent a reflection of bad time management.

It is good to know about some of the problems in the world but knowing too much about too many things you cannot do anything about just leads to frustration. So limit news and if you must look set an amount of time for this and stick with it.

In whatever you do it is important to be productive. Think of some times when you got a lot done, you were focused. There were few distractions. Do you keep your Instant messager open all the time? if you must then try to shut off audio alerts. Most of the messages, like 99.999% are not critical or urgent.

Email is one set of information that has the power to drain more time than it must. I have learned to shut google mail completly and only open a couple times a day.

Just because it is ringing does not mean you must answer your phone. If I am in a project I don’t take calls, read email, or even read IM messages.

Schedule some of the stuff you know will just spin you in a million directions and set the amount of time you will allow. Twitter, forums, Facebook, Myspace….

We allow some of these information bogs because we are procrastinating. Procrastination sounds benine and we all do it, but admit it, aren’t you just putting off something you know you need to do because it is not fun to do or because it intimidates you?

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Tagged as: distractions, information diet, information overload, news sites, procrastination, social networks, time management