In this day and time, we are all required to process a lot of information. This can have several consequences, including:
- Some of the noisy information (undesired information that is not useful) can drown out the useful information.
- Some information that you have not adequately processed “runs around in your head like noise.” In addition to just not feeling good, this can also impact your decision-making and your ability to process additional information.
So, given that we all have to deal with this, I thought it would be good to look at some ways that might help you process information better. We’ll look at the following:
- It Matters How Information is Presented
- Grouping, Labeling, and Filtering
I am also hoping that you will share your thoughts and tips on this important subject.
Before we get into a discussion of information processing, though, let’s deal with the following issue: What can you do when the noise is actually impacting your thinking? I have two answers for that: Mind Sweeping and Meditation. Perhaps you have additional answers, and I’d love to hear them in the comments.
Mind Sweeping and Meditation
Whenever you feel like your mind is “too noisy,” that’s a signal that you need to do a Mind Sweep. If you are not familiar with the term, Merlin Mann does an excellent job of explaining it.
When I recently realized that my mind was too noisy, a mind sweep got me all straightened out. I just grabbed a legal pad and started writing. This revealed some new projects, which I put into my “projects” folder, and I will work through them with appropriate “next actions.” I feel so much better. I’m just upset with myself that I didn’t think of doing this sooner — it had been several months since my last mind sweep, which is way to long.
Now, as for meditation, I cannot speak from experience on it. Not yet, anyway. I have made a resolution to develop the habit of meditating, though, because I have seen so many research articles conclude that meditation leads to clearer thinking, a greater sense of sense of peace, and can even combat Alzheimer’s. For those who already practice meditation, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the best book to guide me into it. I bet several other readers would like to hear from you, too.
It Matters How Information is Presented
To get a sense of how important presentation can be, consider some different ways that daily news can be presented to you.
If you are a fan of using Google Reader (GR), as I am, you might think it would be good to subscribe to some news sites in GR. So, you add Google News and Huffington Post to your feeds. Will that satisfy your craving for news updates? Maybe, but you sure will be flooded with a lot of headlines. And many of these will be of no interest to you, and many will be essentially duplicates (example: 8 updates to one story on the latest war in the Middle East). On top of that, the items are not presented in any order of importance.
To me, this is not a good way to present daily news information. My own preference would be to view one or more of the following a couple of times a day:
The latter three of these are aggregators: they aggregate information from a variety of sources and present it in a dashboard fashion. They are good for providing information-at-a-glance. If you haven’t tried any of these aggregators, I highly recommend experimenting with them. The latter two focus pretty much on the “what is popular/hot” stuff. While you can get that with Alltop, it has information available in over 400 topical areas. So, you can find just about anything you are looking for there. There’s once for science, Buddhism, Christianity, … , ADHD, OCD, … , NFL Football, … and on and on. If you are interested in further details, you might want to check out Chris Brogan’s excellent write-up on Alltop.
If you find the dashboard concept for information processing to be appealing, you’ll surely want to check out Steve Rubel’s making Gmail your gateway to the web. Steve, a Senior VP with Edelman Digital, is an expert on information processing. As I’ve said many times before, I recommend that you subscribe to his blog. When you visit it, you may want to search for the term attention crash, which he coined, and for which he has several very interesting articles.
if you like Steve’s idea of Gmail as a gateway, you might want to also look into a service called notify.me — it supposedly will email you about the types of information you sign up for, and, according to this post, it will even email you when one of your Alltop pages changes. I have not tried this service, because, unlike Steve Rubel, I prefer to use my Gmail account for just email: I don’t want it cluttered with anything else. (By the way, you could probably set up Microsoft Outlook to serve as a sort of gateway, too.)
One final point on presentation: it’s generally better to use the List View mode of Google Reader than the Expanded View. I learned this the hard way. For about two years, I used the Expanded View and used the j and k shortcut keys (along with PGUP and PGDN) to page through articles. Well, a few weeks back, I switched to using the List View and can now quickly scan hundreds of items, speeding up my time on GR by a good bit. When I see a headline of interest, I either click it to read it, or Star it for later reading.
There is another advantage to using the GR List View, too, which we will cover in the following section.
Grouping, Labeling, and Filtering
Fortunately, most email tools make it easy to group, label, and/or filter emails so that you are not stuck with looking at a long unorganized list. Outlook has its stars/colors, which will force items to the top of the list, and it also supports folders, which you can use to organize emails into actionable, informational, project-related, proposal-related, … groupings. Gmail also supports grouping and labels (which act like folders).
Also in Outlook, you can use Rules to handle information from different people in different ways. For example, you can set up a rule that all items from your boss go into your “Boss Folder.”
An additional step that a lot of large corporations use is to enforce everyone in the company to use a prefacing code for email, to help distinguish actionable email from informational email. For example, emails that require a follow-up action would have a subject line that begins with “Action Required: ” with the remainder of the subject line specifying the subject. (It could also specify the due date.) Emails that are for information only would have subject lines that begin with “FYI: ” and so on. When you sort such emails, you wind up with all of the action-oriented ones in one place and all the info-only emails in another.
If your company is not using this, you might want to talk with someone in your IT organization to see if they can set it up.
You can also use labeling/grouping with Google Reader (I suppose other readers support this, too … I have not used any, though, so I cannot say for sure). This is illustrated with the picture on the right, which shows a few of my categories and their associated feeds. The nice thing about doing this is that I can choose to just look at selected topics, instead of wading through the new feeds for all topics.
Speaking of feed readers, have you ever wondered what percentage of your feeds you are actually reading? Well, if you use the List View of Google Reader, then GR will actually tell you the percentage you are reading, for each feed. You have to use the list view, though. If you use the expanded view, like I used to do, and use the j/k, PGUP/PGDN keys to navigate through the feeds, GR assumes you are reading every item you page through. That turned out being a hugely false assumption for my reading, as I often glanced at a headline, didn’t think it was worth reading, and hit the “j” key for the next item. GR thought I read the item, but I didn’t.
The picture below is a snapshot of my actual trends for the past 30 days, showing my reading percentages. Note that the first several days are from when I was still using the Expanded View instead of the List View. You can see the huge difference it makes.
Google Reader also tells you, for each feed, what percentage of the feed’s stories you have read. You can use this to weed out feeds that just aren’t giving you a good percentage of stories. For example, if you are only reading 5% of the articles from a site, is that site even worth subscribing to? I’m not saying that 5% is the magic number … it could be higher or lower, depending on your tastes and how clobbered with information you think you are (how motivated you are to cut back on the feeds). The bottom line, though, is that you can use this information to “right-size” your feeds.
Wrap-up
Hopefully this gives you some ideas on how to manage the information in your life so that it feels less noisy.
I’d love to hear your thoughts and tips in this area.