Anyone who doubts that we are in the Information need only count the number of email messages, phone messages, and text missives he has in queue. There should be plenty.
This flow of information is such that company Basex, Inc. called information overload the top productivity hurdle of 2008, costing the U.S. economy $588 billion a year.
And the January 2008 Reader's Digest ran a cover piece on how one can cope with such an overload. Although it's hard to measure and a real apples vs. oranges argument to compare how much information is processed compared to yesteryear, the Digest article quotes "Getting Things Done" author David Allen here: "We now get more information in 72 hours than our parents likely received in a month," Allen said. "Most people don't have the skills to deal with this. They let new things in but don't get rid of old info they wanted to act on."
Suffice it to say, that's a lot of stuff going into people's heads. Enough to turn an average person's brain into Swiss cheese? Possibly.
Many workers are graced with such executive perks as a company cell phone, laptop, and Internet connection. Right away you'd think, gee, that's awful nice of the employer, right? Forget it. Nothing's free. The company laptop isn't just there for you to work on your Myspace page, or God forbid, your resume ... but for you to get bombarded with more company-related information (and to do company-related work) during your off-hours. I guess I should rephrase -- almost nothing is free -- what ends up being "free" is the work you end up doing for the company, in your living room, on your time, on their rig. Beware ye of such gifts.
Until recently, I had the luxury of an always-on Internet connection, and I made good use of it. The best resource, if you wish to keep up with any particular subject at all, is the RSS feed. Think subscription here, and that's the idea. Whenever something new goes into a website you wish to track, it will pop up in (your choice) email box or RSS reader. In fact, you can do that with this very blog ... just click on RSS; you know you want to.
The catch is, it doesn't take long to get swamped with RSS feeds. With a subscription to a wire news service such as the Associated Press (as I found out), you can get hundreds of articles in a day. My own RSS habit was conservative by Internet standards, but if I was away from the computer for one day there would usually be at least a thousand articles waiting for me to weigh ... uhh, I mean read.
Yeah. I'll get right on it.
My Google reader program, never fast to begin with, would get so jammed with unread articles that I'd have to wait for the screen to refresh itself when I'd scroll. Mind you, the computer is kind of old, but with a high-speed connection and an operating system I'd chosen for light weight and tricked out for speed, it takes a lot of garbage for the machine to crawl like that.
Strangely enough, many of my RSS sites pertained to how one can work efficiently with all of this information. There are some I highly recommend, -- lifehacker.com is my favorite of them -- but then I'd rather collect the information than act on it. Just like David Allen said.
Due to extenuating circumstances, I no longer have that high-speed connection, and I'm torn here. Does it make my life more or less difficult? I do my Internet work at the local library two or three times a week, so I have to simplify things a bit. Which may in fact be simplifying my life; a wonderful thing if I can get just past the withdrawal symptoms.
I take care of all my email during these library visits and don't even bother to open most of it. Family members and one close friend can shortstop this process by sending email directy to my cell phone; everyone else must wait their turn. I son't spend near as much time on the social networking sites, Wikipedia, or all those other time-eaters. And I haven't checked Google Reader for a while. Quite frankly, I'm afraid to. How do you say TILT in Googlese?
Going online now, I make a plan. This blog and my email are always at the top of the list, then whatever other projeI'm working on. And like at the grocery store, I make a list. It's tough -- about on the same level as giving up cigarettes or coffee -- but it feels good knowing I'm sparing brain cells from an onslaught.
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