With all the books, newspapers, blogs, journals, and magazines out there, it’s seriously hard for me to find time to read everything I want to. I’m someone who will anything for the sake of reading something (yes, I have been known to read the coffeemaker manual or fine print on a box of Kraft Dinner), so it’s in my nature to hoard things to read. The problem is twofold: even if I have time to read it all, do I actually absorb any of it? It’s hard to say. I’ve been thinking about what can be done to ease information overload and improve retention, and came up with this list.
5. Trust your real-life colleagues. They know you: what you’re interested in, what makes you laugh, and what gets you riled up. And they’re already sending you things they know you’ll want to read. So go ahead, trust them. Give their suggestions priority, especially if they work in environments similar to yours. Don’t forget to return the favour. (I’m working on giving people a little more to go on than just “thought you might be interested” and adding something concrete and specific about why they should read it.)
4. Don’t over- or underestimate the heavyweights. The blogosphere is so ridiculously self-referential that anything really good (news, commentary, or otherwise) is going to get picked up by lots of bloggers, especially the really prominent ones. Find a few you consider to be “star” bloggers and get to know their posting styles. Reevaluate periodically…are they still living up to your expectations?
3. Be ruthless. For RSS, I try to review and weed my feeds every few months, to get rid of stuff that I subscribed to on a whim but haven’t looked at regularly since. As for paper, I usually have a pile of magazines and journals stacked up on my desk, both at home and at work, in which I will often find articles that are months old and pretty much out of date. It can be painful, but I try to remember Jack Handey’s advice: “If you ever drop your keys into a river of molten lava, let’em go, because, man, they’re gone”, and apply it to my accumulation of periodicals. Just let those articles go. They’re gone.
2. Think smaller and narrower. Until recently, I had the Wired RSS feed in my aggregator, but that baby spit up way too much content for me - sometimes a dozen or more new items in a day (which is obviously a fine volume of headlines or news, but not articles). I noticed that I was consistently keeping Lore Sjöberg’s AltText and Tony Long’s The Luddite columns new. So, I got rid of the “Everything from Wired” feed and subscribed only to those two. My IRL friend Laurel is a devout Wired reader, so I know she’ll pass along anything cool that she thinks I’ll enjoy.
(OR)
If you’re feeling extra ambitious, filter your feeds so that they capture only what you’re interested in. Steve Matthews has a good post on Feedrinse. I’m trying this out and so far it seems to work pretty well.
1. Do something with your newfound knowledge . That’s assuming you’ve found something that sounds useful or like fun to experiment with. Submit it to a newsletter, ask a colleague’s opinion of it, blog about it, etc. Whatever you do, do something with it! I find that the likelihood of me putting some new idea to use is much greater if I revisit it.
So there you have it. What works for you? Leave a comment if you’ve got any tips!
*Of course, I did a little research before writing this list. It seems they’ve already found the cure!
