Too Much Information: a Follow-up

About a month ago I wrote an article on having too much information, and feeling like the inflow of information was taking too much of my time. I decided to start cutting down on the number of feeds in my Google Reader account, and to stop following anyone on Twitter who was “too noisy.”

Now seems like a decent time to give you a progress report on this, and to ask you how you are doing in managing your information inflow (instead of having it manage you).

Google Reader

A few weeks ago, I was spending as much as an hour per day, sometimes two hours, processing the headlines and stories in Google Reader. I was subscribed to 320 feeds, and a few of these feeds had as many as 20 (or even 30) posts per day. I was seeing a lot of stories that just did not interest me and I was seeing a huge amount of repetition, where several people wrote about the exact same topics.

So, I vowed to do something about that, am now down to 87 feeds, and generally spend less than 30 minutes per day processing those feeds (skimming headlines and reading selected articles). Some of the feeds that I dropped may surprise you: Engadget, Gizmodo, Crunchgear, Mashable, Lifehacker (I deleted the full feed and subscribed instead to their feed of Top Stories only), and so on. In each case, I looked at their last 20 posts to see if there were at least 20% that were of interest to me. Those that didn’t meet the 20% threshold got whacked.

Now of course your tastes and needs may be different from mine. I am just sharing my view that you do not need subscribe to a feed just because it has a large circulation: just look at whether it is really giving you the kind of information you want, on balance.

Another thing one can do with feeds is to organize them. Susan mentioned this to me yesterday, and she shared some of her categories to exemplify the concept:

Right now I have the following folders:
“inspirational”- feeds that make me go hmmmm, like the Et Tu?
“friends” – feeds of friends, your site, Matt Miller’s Geeking for Jesus
“internet”- feeds like Google blogs and Firefox blogs that aid productivity
“software”-feeds that let me know about software updates…..
“recycle”- feeds I will probably end up deleting

She also mentioned a post that describes how to do a 3d organization of your feeds. I need to do much more of this. One good thing about organizing like this is that it lets you see where the holes are in your feeds. For example, I realized from this that I do not have enough inspirational feeds. So, I will be on the lookout for some good ones to add.

Twitter

My attitude to Twitter is still evolving. For a while, I had only a few friends on it, and it was great. Then, as I started adding more, including some of the more prolific bloggers, it got very noisy. Some people “tweet” over a dozen times a day, sometimes even more than that. When several people are doing that, it is easy to overlook some of the more interesting tweets because of the “noise.”

So, for everyone who tweeted more than 10 times in one day, I sent them the following message, and then stopped following them:

I am unfollowing everyone who tweets >= 10 times per day. You will probably want to unfollow me too.

Now I kinda regret having done this. Not in all cases, but in a few.

Interestingly, since then, the number of people who follow me has almost doubled and the number of people that I follow has gone up by a good 50-percent. And I am finding I am liking Twitter more, not less. GeekMommy’s post on Twitter was a good calibration for me. She pointed out that she gave up on trying to keep up with all the communication, and learned to just slip back into the “communication stream” from time to time. She also mentions the use of Tweet Scan, to see if anyone has tweeted you, so you don’t have to worry about such messages getting lost in the stream.

I have also learned that we all need to have communication “bursts” at times. How could I criticize someone for tweeting 10 times in a day, when I have probably done the same thing? I know there are times when I generate a half-dozen tweets in the course of one setting at the computer.

So, my view on Twitter has changed and I no longer view it as noise. I view it in many positive ways now. One positive thing for me is that it reminds me that I live in a world where there are a lot of people, and that we all need to communicate from time to time. Since I have retired, I spend well over 90-percent of my time at home, so I need reminders that there are a lot of good people “out there,” and that we all need each other.

Sometimes we just want to know that somebody hears us. And sometimes we need to be reminded that there are people who are concerned about raising their kids, doing a good job at work, dealing with crappy weather, enjoying pretty weather, and so on. Twitter does all of this very well for me. It helps me feel somehow “connected.” So, as I said earlier, my views on Twitter have changed somewhat.

Wrap-Up

One final thing I have done to feel better about how I spend some of my online time is to drop my FriendFeed account. It was just giving me more information than I could ever process. Not only was it showing my friends’ tweets, but it also showed the posts they bookmarked on delicious, and on StumbleUpon, and the photos they had uploaded to Flickr, and on and on. It was just too much. A good idea if you only want to “friend with” a couple of people maybe, but it gets out of control with a dozen people and above.

Well, that’s a summary of where I am at now with my online information management. What are your thoughts and ideas on this subject?