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Information Overload
As more and more content and interaction moves online, it’s easy to start feeling overwhelmed. Or as put by Sarah Houghton-Jan, in her piece, Being Wired or Being Tired: 10 Ways to Cope with Information Overload:
What is information overload? 27 instant messages. 4 text messages. 17 phone calls. 98 work emails. 52 personal emails. 76 email listserv messages. 14 social network messages. 127 social network status updates. 825 RSS feed updates. 30 pages from a book. 5 letters. 11 pieces of junk mail. 1 periodical issue. 3 hours of radio. 1 hour of television. That, my friends, is information overload.It is also my daily average amount of information received, sampled over a two-week period. That’s right—that much in every category every day. I suppose that is why I was called upon to write an article about coping with information overload (IO). I am still here, I am still alive, and my brain has yet to explode, so somehow I must be finding a way to make it work. At least, that is what other people tell me.
Houghton-Jan is coming from a Librarian perspective, but her “Ten Techniques to Manage the Overload,” are probably worth reading if you feel like you’re buried under a mountain of digital content. In the ten, Houghton-Jan covers everything from general organization techniques, to RSS and email management, to print materials, to of course social media and then finally general time and stress management. To find out the specifics, go read the rest: Being Wired or Being Tired: 10 Ways to Cope with Information Overload, and feel free to share you favorites, or your own ideas, here.
— michael | September 5, 2008 04:12 PM | Something to think about
