Web Design, Web Development and Internet Marketing

My Favorite Tools For Information Overload Management

January 6

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Does this sound familiar?

You read a 140 character tweet from your favorite Twitizen…
Which leads you to a post on their blog where they comment on another blog with a link to the original post… (They also refer to a book you might be interested in.)
You now have 4 browser tabs open where each one has at least one other link to a topic you might want to read…
Pretty soon your in over your head, it’s lunch time and you haven’t done a damn thing.

At least it was fun and maybe your learned something.

It happens to me all too often. Here are a couple suggestions you could try to manage this problem.

Give in and read it all

Of course in a perfect world, I would indulge myself and consume it all. If you had enough time, money and an infinitely large bladder you could just sit and read posts all day, but few of us have that luxury.

Unless you choose to live like Howard Hughes, there has to be a limit. Fortunately, there are other methods you can try.

Pull the plug

Paul Graham, author, startup founder and angel investor has a great essay which describes his approach to this problem. He solves it by maintaining a secondary computer which isn’t connected to the internet –a work computer where he actually Gets Things Done. He forces himself to get up and walk over to a separate computer where he checks email and internet browsing.

Overall, it’s a good idea, but also has the flaw (for me) that you might just as easily sit at the wired computer and get sucked in, rather than ever return to the unwired one. It requires discipline. If I had any of that, I wouldn’t have this problem to begin with.

Save for later

There are a bunch of ways to save your post. You could bookmark it in your browser, but that takes a few seconds to direct it where you want and it may saved only on your local computer. I started using XMarks to alleviate the second problem, but it still takes too much time at the rate I go.

Posting it to a bookmark site like Delicous, same problem. I reserve this for technical stuff that I may want to use over and over, like reference type sites.

A great tool I love is Instapaper which allows you to easily save any page using by simply clicking a bookmarklet. It’s fast and easy. It’s great when you have 5 or more tabs open but have to go do something else or actually get some work done.

The interesting thing is when you return to some of what you saved, you might find yourself better able to pick and choose what you actually want to invest your time reading rather than feeling compelled to take it all in.