With blogs, online news publications, aggregators, and social media, there is a lot of information being produced at a more rapid pace than ever before. User-generated content is flowing onto the web at a ridiculous pace. That comes in the form of blog posts, articles, status updates, tweets, forums, wikis, etc. That doesn’t even take into account personal messages in email, private messages, text messages, and on and on and on.
There’s not enough time in the day to get to everything that you want to, at least not if you intend to have any kind of a life away from your computer or mobile device. Businesses have to worry about this even more than the average consumer, because they have to factor in things like reputation monitoring and productivity, but also staying up to date on relevant information and news.
A recent Wired piece at some good advice for “digesting the web like a Twitter feed.” Twitter has a clean and concise interface, and Wired suggests trying to replicate this. One way they suggest creating such an uncluttered and distraction-free environment is to look for print versions of articles (murdok has this). They usually strip away a lot of the stuff you don’t need to read an article, that can cause distractions.
Other tips include using news readers or using Twitter like a feed reader. I couldn’t agree more with both of these tips. As far as Twitter is concerned, Twitter’s recently added “Lists” feature can help this tremendously. You can use lists just as if they were folders in a feed reader like Google reader. This can help you categorize your incoming tweets and reduce “noise.” You can essentially do the same thing on Facebook.
There are other services and tools out there beyond traditional feed readers, and the major social networks that can help you. Twingly, for example, combines search technology, filtering services, and social aspects into one service. Watch the following clip for more on that.
One more tip I would offer is to get some kind of smartphone, and use it to keep up with information when you have random breaks and downtime during the day, whether that be waiting for your food to arrive at a restaurant, waiting at the dentist’s office, or going out for a smoke.
There’s no concrete solution for solving the problem of too much information, too little time. There are, however, tools out there that can help you better manage your time and optimize your strategy for consuming information. Organization plays a key role in how you can do this. If you use feed readers, Twitter, Facebook Groups, or whatever else, take some time to organize them. Depending on how many feeds/friends/followers you have to deal with, it may present a time-consuming task in itself, but will most likely save you a lot of time and help you prioritize your information consumption down the road.
As you head back to work on Monday (or perhaps before), think about some ways you can improve the organization of your content intake. Not only will it save you more time in the long run, it may help you to stay more informed in the areas that matter the most.
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