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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