Information overload is not a new concept for me. After all, I declared email bankruptcy way back in 2007. Sadly, that was a bit too well publicized at places like USA Today and the London Times, which means it’s REALLY embarrassing that I haven’t yet learned from my experiences.
Recently, I was reading Clay Johnson’s blog post on information dieting and attention fitness, which came at a very relevant time as I’m once again trying to figure out how to fit about a thousand hours of stuff in every 24 hour day. Last weekend at FOO camp, I attended a session Jane McGonigal held about hurry sickness and having time poverty. Scott Berkun, who was at the session, later did a blog post about the cult of busy. I was talking about all of this on Twitter, and Scott Hanselman sent me a link to a talk he gave about managing information overload. I said what he talked about was scary. He asked me why. The answer wouldn’t fit into 140 characters so I thought I’d do a blog post.
I am, without a doubt, too busy. I absolutely suffer from what Scott Hanselman calls “psychic weight” and often find myself “thrashing to disk”. There’s so much that my brain can’t even figure out where to start. Part of it is inefficiency, sure. But a lot of it is simply having too much to do. At the FOO session, I described it this way: I say yes to too many things, but I want to say yes to lots of things. It’s what keeps life interesting and has gotten me to where I am now. I get to do lots of amazing things because I’m open to new stuff as it comes along. But Scott Berkun said, you gotta say no to stuff. You just have to.
In Clay’s post, he says the problem isn’t too much information, it’s too much consumption. Saying yes to too much. Trying to do too much at once.
But how to do we fix it? Maybe some of it is little things. Scott Hanselman suggests not checking your email first thing in the morning. Clay suggests keeping open tabs to a minimum and closing all windows except the ones you need to accomplish the task at hand. Which apparently means we should try to have only one task at hand at a time. But it’s also big things. Not saying yes to too much in the first place.
So why is the thought of figuring this out so scary? Why is it scary to consider NOT reaching for the phone to check email while still in bed in the morning? What’s so frightening about saying no? Anyone who knows me knows I want to do it all. But I want to do it all well, which clearly is difficult when you’re doing everything at once. So maybe I’m fearing the opposite of what I should.
So, I ask you: have you solved this problem? For the little things and for the big things. How do you get the information about the world that you want without getting so drowned in information that it bogs down your life? How do you keep on top of what you’ve said yes to? How do you keep from saying yes to too much?
PS – I don’t need another copy of Getting Things Done. I already have two.
July 1st, 2010 at 8:31 pm
The idea of closing all tabs except the ones you’re working with right now is a really good one. I didn’t recognize the psychic weight of all those tabs until it was gone.
The best life-simplifying, anxiety-reducing thing I’ve introduced recently is a task management system called Kan Ban. I wrote about it here: http://bit.ly/abKAqM