Are you fed up with the amount of information that flows your way, particularly all the stuff from the online world? Me, too, and I have been fed up with it for some time.
An information scientist recently noted that useful information is increasing at a linear rate, while spam and other non-useful information is increasing exponentially. I think he’s right about the non-useful part, but I also suspect that useful information is increasing at an exponential rate, too … it’s just that it has a smaller exponent than the non-useful info. The bottom line is the same regardless: the ratio of good stuff to crap is decreasing, and it is going to become even harder to find good info amongst all the crap.
So, what can we do? I’m not entirely sure, but I am experimenting:
- I’ve cut down the number of RSS feeds I follow from a one-time high of over 300 to its current 46. Even having done that, though, there are still too many repetitive articles and there are far too many that are not even worth reading. Out of every 50 articles, I read only 2 to 5, max. I will continue to make cuts in the feeds. For example, this morning I cut TechCrunch from my feeds after noticing that only one of its last 30 stories had any appeal to me at all.
- I am searching for good aggregation sites so that I don’t have to even have a feed reader. Right now I am very impressed with TechMeme for finding the best technical articles. Of course, it doesn’t capture articles about life management or learning, since it is strictly technical. But, I think it will let me cut down on most of my tech feeds. It could be that Yahoo!, CNN, Huffington Post, The Economist, and so on, replace my other feeds.
- Twitter, as enjoyable and informative as it can be at times, consumes too much of my time. So this week I am doing without it. (The LifeHacker and Matt Cutts blogs have articles on this “fad” of going without Twitter for a week.) So far I do not miss it a bit (I’ve done without it 3 days), and I feel more peace of mind, too. There’s just less clutter and junk in my mind.
I’m going to continue to work on ways to reduce the influx of non-useful information into my life. What about you? What are you doing to cut back on it? What good aggregation tools have you found?
It is funny that you posted this today as I have been doing the same thing, you can see my blog post about it here.
I too think Twitter is a waste of my time at times, but then it is very useful at other times. Could I do away with it for a while, probably, but it is such a good tool to get the word out that I don’t think you should abandon it all together.
I have been thinking about reducing multiple email addresses and combining them into Gmail instead of using Outlook but I haven’t made that move yet, still exploring my options.
Thanks for you blog it is very informative, I will be adding it to my feed reader…
“I will be adding it to my feed reader…”
You’re joking, right?
Thanks Phil
No not joking… I have read your blog from front to back and you have a lot of interesting articles here. Great information all around. I do have many feeds in my reader but only skim them for interesting items.
The reason I came here originally was because of the Carrington theme which I am debating using for some projects, but then I found all your interesting articles. I am a tech-head myself so I find myself in good company here. I am also trying to teach myself Guitar for the the new year so maybe I can pick up some tips here as well.
Thanks, Phil. You made my day.
I noticed that Alex King put in a support ticket to address the custom sidebar for a page issue that you and I are interested in. So hopefully there will be a fix soon.
Good luck on learning the guitar, and I hope you enjoy it. BTW, I put up a few more YouTube videos of my playing: http://www.youtube.com/user/drkeener
Take care. I look forward to your comments and insights.
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