Clay Shirky said once that it wasn’t information overload, but filter failure. Although he is right, I think there is even an bigger issue than just failing filters. It is the endless need of people nowadays to consume more data. Since we have the tools to select, to store and archive all the data we want, we just do that. I don’t how many people I talked with last year about the enormous pile of links, webpages, pdfs and other documents they were planning to read. When they ran into something: swoosh…. adding it to readitlater, instapaper, web2pdf or any other service you could think of to store it and to read it later (mainly: not reading it all anymore).
However, with the endless (free) opportunity to store things and the ease of use to add articles to a read it later list, people are killing their information consumption. Since there is no limit on RSS feeds in for example Google Reader, people tend to add as many feeds as they ran into. Adding them is free and easy, so why not add them. However they are complaining at the same time that they still have 1000+ items unread in Google Reader.
While they add the content themselves, it seems they blame the content producers for writing too much content to read. It is like blaming McDonalds for fulfulling your order of 10 BigMacs and you are so stuffed you can only eat 8. McDonalds is just doing the thing you’d ask them to do, content creators are just doing the same. If you hadn’t been so greedy, you were not suffering of 1000+ unread items in your RSS reader or in a huge (virtual pile) of documents.
So put yourself on a diet, don’t be greedy. Every feed that has more than 15 unread items in your RSS reader isn’t worth reading, if you’d really care enough about the content of that feed less items would be unread. So remove those feeds, don’t be afraid that you’ll miss the content, you are missing it already because you are not reading it. If something is on your read it later list for more than 48 hours, remove it, if it was really interesting, you’d read in the mean time. If you only read in the weekend, remove all the unread items on Sundays, if the content was interesting you’d read them already.
If things are important they will come to you. There is no need for digital packratting. Although there are no costs for it, you sure pay a price by cluttering your information flow.
If you have a hard time in selecting what things you should put on your read-it-later list, create this simple rule: put 1 cent in a jar for every item your set away for later reading and put 5 cents in the jar for every item you put away but didn’t read. Put 10 cent in a jar for every RSS feed you add to your RSS reader and put 1 cent in the jar for every item in a RSS feed you did not read after 48 hours.
After a year: get the money out of the jar and give it to charity; at least somebody will then benefit from your greediness.
Excellent advice. I love “Every feed that has more than 15 unread items in your RSS reader isn’t worth reading, if you’d really care enough about the content of that feed less items would be unread” and so forth. Although RSS feeds are the least of our problems, since nobody expects us to read all of the items. It's email – work related email – that I see as the major threat, because people struggle to go through every message. Whether people would be willing to erase every message they haven't gotten to in a week is in doubt – they don;t read them anyway in the end, but the act of erasing an unread one is scaring them too much :-(
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This post was mentioned on Twitter by rickmans: It is not information overload, it is information gluttony (and what you can do to solve it!) http://tinyurl.com/ycwodal...
HOw much should I put in the jar for every professional book that I've bought and how much if I haven't read it after 1 month?
Just give the book somebody who will read. This way somebody still
benefits from the book gluttony :).
I manage work related email in quite the same way. I answer almost every
email within 24 hours (especially those that require a response). Mail that
are fyi, or mailed to a group are less important for me. If I can add value
by replying to those mails I will do that asap, however if I cannot reply to
that mail within for example 24 or 48 hours than I move that mail to my
archive. It might be a bit of arrogance, but if people really want me to
reply to a mail, they should send it to me personally, if they send it to a
group they'd expect an answer from the group and specifically from an
individual.
That is quite effective for me over the last few years and I haven't had any
complaints about it :).
Love it – funnily, I went through my Google reader account at the weekend and deleted about 50% of the feeds. Some were a hose, some were duplicates of what i get to first on twitter, some no longer relevant. Call it the sock drawer! important to keep the good ones and throw out the ones wearing thin!
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Kingsley Idehen, Rick Mans, nigelwalsh, nigelwalsh, Nathan Zeldes and others. Nathan Zeldes said: RT @rickmans It is not information overload, it is information gluttony http://tinyurl.com/ycwodal [...]
[...] precies de oorzaak is, is niet belangrijk, wat echter wel belangrijk is, is dat er een dieet is, zoals ik al eerder op mijn Engelstalige blog heb geschreven: If you have a hard time in selecting what things you should put on your read-it-later list, create [...]