Pulling the Plug on Information
Prominent software consultant Christopher Hawkins announced yesterday what we might characterize as the “baby and the bathwater” solution to dealing with information overload. He’s unsubscribing from all his RSS feeds, deleting all his browser bookmarks, and leaving all his social networks:
There is a limited amount of overhead that the human brain can sustain and still be highly productive. I believe that every feed I follow, every blog I read regularly, every bit of connected-ness I currently have to various destinations in the tech blog echo chamber is like a lead weight, slowing down my brain….Basically, if it’s not helping me to secure or complete projects for my company, if it’s not helping me to make money, if it’s not improving my life in some way, it’s mental clutter and it’s out.
In our previous discussions of avoiding information overload (and the contrarian notion that overload is good for you), most web workers have focused on ways to fine-tune and channel attention so as to find the necessary information at the right time. Hawkins is advocating a much more radical approach that will no doubt strike a chord with some people in its “the emperor has no clothes” simplicity. If trying to keep up with the fast-paced world is driving you nuts, just stop.
Personally, though, I don’t believe this is a viable course of action (and presumably you don’t either, or you wouldn’t be reading WWD). My own personal history in the computer industry is haunted by knowing several extremely smart and successful firms that withered and died because they thought they’d reached a point where they could keep using and selling their current skill set indefinitely. Whether it was dBase or classic ASP, this wasn’t a viable strategy; the lifespan of skills in our industry is measured in years at best, months at worst. Given that I’m always going to have to learn new things to stay competitive (until I retire or die), I am driven to remain a part of the echo chamber, imperfect though it is, to try to figure out which new things are important enough to learn.
So while I think it’s possible to get too involved in blogging and reading RSS feeds and social networking (activities that could easily consume 24 hours a day), it still seems to me that the answer isn’t to reduce them to zero either. I find the idea of asking whether a particular activity is useful to my career or my life useful, but at a finer level of granularity than Hawkins suggests: trimming individual RSS feeds and social networks on a regular basis, rather than across the whole baby and bathwater at once.
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Imagine if you lived a professional life where you talked to absolutely every single person you looked at. How much would you get done? Instead, you talk to people you need to talk to, when it’s appropriate to do so. As web workers, I think our use of RSS feeds, IM, social networks, and email is how we “talk” and in fact careful use makes us more productive and connected. I would no more boycott those things than I would take a vow of silence.
Ditto.
And with Meetimer it’s easy to track how much time you actually use reading those _essential_ RSS-feeds (&c) and plan your daily schedule accordingly.
It’s also easy to notice if you are spending too much time, well, twittering.
Hi, this is a very interesting post. Here’s what I do for my low-information-diet:
1) RSS feeds – I have chosen the top 5 for me (AskMen.com, NYTimes, etc :))
2) Single e-mail account (gmail)
3) Only one cell phone
4) TV is out
5) Books – 1 hour before get to sleep
That’s all.
I’ve tried this all-or-nothing approach and at first it was very liberating. I didn’t feel the urge to always be “on”. However, I felt disconnected from the world. I have several close friends from my school days that I routinely keep in touch with. The most efficient way to do this is through email, IM, and now Facebook. Calling isn’t always the most discreet way to talk.
I missed the fun of meeting new people. I missed the exploration of new blogs, feeds,and sites. Keeping up with tech blogs allows me to stay up to date for my job.I have to know what is going on now, not tomorrow. My business decisions rely on quick access to the latest information.
There is always a time and place to disconnect from the online world.
It is plain silly to disconnect when working in a fast paced field like tech, however info overload can be awful. This week I wiped out my cellphone. It is getting repaired, but I am having a really nice time without it. Info holidays are what we need sometimes.
I learn a lot from my feeds, but then some of them are about language and music. It’s not all about tech. Of course nothing wrong with tech feeds and social networks either. Some day though, we’ll figure out how to channel all this information in ways more efficient than the ones we have right now.
I wrote a reply here recently where I said I felt that people didn’t need to be curt or brusque in their use of e-mail. I still believe that.
However, I think it’s perfectly reasonable to also limit the total number of contacts or information sources you deal with and take in. When I went to the library recently I checked out a copy of Marcus Aurelius because I’d never read him in college and thought I might gain from his “Meditations.” I have never read a Danielle Steele novel (from beginning to end, anyway), but did NOT feel compelled to check out any of her books even though her volumes outnumber those by Marcus Aurelius at least 30:1.
rationalpsychic
http://rationalpsychic.wordpress.com
It makes sense to focus in on feeds that might be useful as well as entertaining. How might they be useful? Ideas, discussion, news, contacts…all these things can potentially be found or cultivated through focused browsing. This is only a small part of what I do. Most of time it’s important to be able to ignore it all and delve deep into off-line work.
It is true that information is pouring faster and faster. To deal with this challenge one can use a) software that extracts and summarizes the essential facts and b) software that visualizes the text information (like MindManager).
One can also combine automatic text summarization with visualization. In the past few years I have been working on both aspects. For anyone who would like to get their web pages and Google searches instantly summarized I can point to Context Organizer (http://www.contextdiscovery.com).
Another improvement can be to apply scripts that summarize large number of search results and report to the user. This way the user takes advantage of a summarizing robot that spiders large number of pages and extracts only the topics that are of interest to the user.
Large amount of information is a good thing providing that we have more practical ways to take advantage of it.
Best regards,
Henry
Information overload along with dis integration have cause immence damage to decision making – time to aggrgate everything at the one place -