Archive for the ‘Information Overload’ Category

After taking a few days off last week, I returned to find my email inbox full of hundreds of new messages, so I am looking forward to reading Whitson Gordon’s Top 10 Tricks for Dealing With Email Overload at Lifehacker. Here are the first 5 tricks to spark your interest:

1. Triage Your Email to an Empty Inbox
2. Get Rid of Unwanted Spam
3. Learn to Use the Search Function
4. Use Text Expansion to Save Yourself Hours of Typing
5. Keep It Under Control When You’re On Vacation

Dawn Foster at GigaOm writes about how to Take Control of Your Inbox: 9 Ways to Sort Email. If you’re struggling with email overload you’ll want to check out these helpful suggestions for filters and folders to sort and process your email communications:

• Status reports
• High volume subjects
• Twitter messages
• People
• Unimportant

Stan Schroeder at Mashable creates a guide to How To: Get the Most Out of Google Reader. If you’re a new GReader user, or you’re looking for ways to organize all your feeds you may want to check out this handy post which covers the following topics:

• Folders
• Trends
• Shortcuts
• Other Tweaks

Dawn Foster at GigaOm offers 11 Tips for Dealing With Email Overload. If you’re feeling overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information coming into your email inbox, these are some great tips for managing it. Here are the first five recommendations:

1. Unsubscribe
2. Turn off or filter the bacn
3. Use RSS
4. Aggressively archive into folders
5. Use filters and rules

Jason Fitzpatrick at Lifehacker writes about How to Maintain a Project List that Doesn’t Crush Your Soul. If you have a growing to-do list and are looking to improve your productivity, you’ll want to check out this informative article.

“Whether you’re an adherent of David Allen’s Getting Things Done or any other system that encourages you to capture all the ideas floating around in your head and commit them to paper (or a digital medium), it’s likely you’ve gotten pretty good at the capture side of things. It’s on the other end of the conveyor belt, where the ideas get sorted, categorized, and made useful, that things tend to get murky. In my productivity workflow, the capture side of things has always been the most enjoyable and easiest—all it really takes is a stack of index cards, a pen, and a wandering mind! Even though ubiquitous capture is an awesome habit to have, it has an often overlooked downside. The more ideas or to-dos you increase, the more things you have floating around in your potential workflow. If you don’t effectively deal with those things, you end up with a stagnant pool of ideas and the feeling that you’ll never do anything with all these ideas/tasks/to-dos you’ve captured.”

Amy-Mae Elliott at Mashable presents a quick guide to How To: Spring Clean Your Twitter Account. If you’re looking to get organized and filter out some of the unwanted Twitter noise, you’ll want to check out these recommendations:

• Weed Out Inactive Users
• Find Out Who is Following Whom
• Filter Out the Noise
• Set Up Your Twitter Lists
• Refresh Your Twitter Profile

The Non-profit Tech 2.0 blog recommends 10 Tips for Managing Social Media Burnout. If you’re on the brink of information overload, you’ll want to scan this helpful list of suggestions. Here are their top five:

1. Don’t update your organization’s profiles on the weekend.
2. Pick a time to quit in the evening and stick to it.
3. Pick one social networking profile and keep it entirely for fun and your personal life.
4. Sometimes just leave the smartphone at home.
5. Take time for lunch.

Wall Street Journal columnist Alexandra Levit writes for Mashable about How To: Deal With Social Networking Overload. She presents a four-step plan to keep up with your social media universe:

1. Ask Yourself Why
2. Consider Your Purpose
3. Create Boundaries
4. Communicate Your Plan

Mahendra Palsule at MakeUseOf posts about keeping up with multiple online networks in 20 Tips to Define And Manage Your Social Networks. Organized into Part I and Part II, this helpful post provides many recommendations for managing your online presence such as:

1. Visualize Your Social Map
2. Define Your Target Audience
3. Use a Password Manager
4. Separate Private & Public Photo-Sharing
5. Use One Social Bookmarking Site

Laura Carscaddon & Colleen S. Harris write for Library Journal about Working the Social: Twitter and FriendFeed: Let these social networking services do the filtering for you.

“Information overload is so five years ago, but the problem it describes is all too real. Fortunately, there’s hope yet for the savvy librarian: Twitter and FriendFeed turn information dissemination on its head, using friends and subscribers as a filter for the best, most credible, and most engaging information out there. As Clay Shirky said at the Web 2.0 Expo keynote in January, the problem isn’t “information overload. It’s filter failure.””

If you’re having difficulty keeping track of all your social media profiles, you may want to check out Web Worker Daily’s recent post about Options for Managing Many Online Identities. Charles Hamilton recommends several helpful aggregators such as DandyID which is a simple service that will let you specify your online identity for over 330 social networks. See the full article for more.

Josh Catone at Mashable puts together a guide to 10 Twitter Tools to Organize Your Tweeps. This quick list includes annotated resources which will help you:

• Find Out Who You’re Following
• Find Your Friends
• Get Rid of Inactives
• Manage it All

New York Magazine discusses the problem of attention in Sam Anderson’s In Defense of Distraction. The article discusses information overload, the limitations of attention, modern multi-tasking, and the advantages of a “new techno-cognitive nomadism”.

“As we become more skilled at the 21st-century task Meyer calls “flitting,” the wiring of the brain will inevitably change to deal more efficiently with more information. The neuroscientist Gary Small speculates that the human brain might be changing faster today than it has since the prehistoric discovery of tools. Research suggests we’re already picking up new skills: better peripheral vision, the ability to sift information rapidly. We recently elected the first-ever BlackBerry president, able to flit between sixteen national crises while focusing at a world-class level. Kids growing up now might have an associative genius we don’t—a sense of the way ten projects all dovetail into something totally new. They might be able to engage in seeming contradictions: mindful web-surfing, mindful Twittering. Maybe, in flights of irresponsible responsibility, they’ll even manage to attain the paradoxical, Zenlike state of focused distraction.”

Ben Parr at Mashable outlines four useful steps to take to Get the Most Out of Gmail Labs, including taking advantage of new GMail features such as the ability to undo sent messages, insert images into emails, and enable location-based signatures. Additionally he offers a list of 10 Recommended Features some of which include:

• Create a Document: Turn any email into a Google doc with this useful little Gmail Labs feature.
• Tasks: Tasks takes your to-do list and makes it part of Gmail. Tasks makes it easy to add items to your to-do list, even allowing you to take emails and turn them into tasks.
• Multiple Inboxes: If you’re a Gmail power user, like most of us at Mashable, you have a lot of different mail sources and lots of labels. See more information at once by activating Multiple Inboxes. Note: this creates new inboxes for labels, not inboxes for secondary Gmail accounts.

Alexandra Levit writes about how to Use Technology To Spend Less Time Working for Forbes.com. This article, along with an accompanying slideshow titled Seven E-Ways To Save Time At Work discusses several methods to increase work-time productivity including:

• Video Calls
• Webinars
• Google Applications
• Networking Services

via Micro Persuasion