Information Management System Broken, Watch For Finger

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This is part one of a thought that continues here and here

I read recently that I’m probably the first of the “tip of my tongue” generation. It was in one of my RSS feeds. Or a magazine. Or perhaps the newspaper.

Information flies past me so fast in a day, with RSS, email and random discovery, that I grab things I think look interesting and I email them to myself. I get far more email from me than I get from anyone else, including that pharmacy in Canada that want to enhance my performance. Then I print it all off (sorry trees) and I read it over lunch, on the train or anywhere I have waiting time. It ends up in one of two piles. Sometimes it just required some time to sit down and read, and I’m done. Other times I cycle around to being in front of the computer again, because it’s got links I want to follow.

I get all my RSS by email. Some people love feed readers, but I love the way Feedblitz sends out one delicious, action-packed digest every day with all my favourite reading in it. Call me a Ludite, but I have an old-fashioned soft spot for email.

Just as an aside, if you’re wondering how to do that, find the RSS link on a site and right click it to “save link location”. Go to Feedblitz and paste the RSS link into the field to add the site to your digest.

In total I probably get 50 or 60 feeds, which sounds like a lot but only takes me (on the first cut) about an hour a day to go through. It’s hardly a chore, because I’ve found 50 or 60 really interesting, inspiring and fun sources of great reading, but if I had to think of it as work I guess it’s the equivalent of “self education”. I devote a small block of every day to keeping up with what’s breaking and buzzing, in my industry, in my areas of interest and in some topics that are just tickle me.

I guess to trivialise it, it’s the modern equivalent of being an interesting dinner guest, but actually it’s much more than that. I’m able to deal with my work from the footing of someone who is widely read and on top of developments. That can be quite an edge in all kinds of unexpected circumstances. No industry or organisation is a silo and to cross-pollinate something that’s happening over there with something happening over here has all kinds of creative possibilities. I’m in a particular branch of the service industry where I also think intelligent empathy is a key deliverable. Clients seek us out for solutions, and I don’t think anyone can even start talking about solutions until they truly understand the problems (or as we like to call them in the perky creative industry, “challenges”). The current favourite term for people like me is T-Shaped, a favourite with thinkers like Tom Kelley, Tim Brown and David Armano. We’re broad in our interests and inquisitive about the world, while at the same time being deep in our skill set. Kind of like generalists with special superpowers.

Of course there’s the fine balance between floating and drowning. There’s a great graph by Colin McKay at Canuckflack that plots “benefit of learning” against “damage to your career” to find the sweet spot. As they say in the toons, “it’s so funny because it’s true”.

Sometimes an hour a day to keep up with the world is a lot to ask and I fall behind. Sometimes those folders of “follow up later” readings from the train sit around for quite some time before I actually do follow them up. Often I’m not in immediate need of the information, and when I do need it 3 months later I have to perform magic tricks with my filing system to make it reappear.

Like many people with a passion for learning, exploring and participating, I’m suffering somewhat from info-glut. Not only do I have choices of more and more sources of information, but change is happening everywhere at a ripping pace. It’s not just my industry and interests, it’s all industries and interests.

A report I read on the Back From Bread & Butter Fashion Trade Show earlier this year noted:

“Some fashion trends are so fast, if u miss it leave it caus it’s already gone! And something else: Streetwear was huge during the last years. All those brands who come from a sporty background got fashionable. But there are so many now, and I think that many of them will not survive in the market. And the sad thing is, that they all make kind of the same stuff. Shirts with a print, Jeans in all colors, hoodies with a “special” cut and so on. But I have enough of those hoodie & shirt materials.”

Too much stuff, changing too quickly.

Steve Rubel observed in The Attention Crash: A New Kind of Dot-Com Bust that:

“In-boxes, smart phones and IM windows are overflowing. Always-on connections, mobile devices and new publishing tools have expanded the media we consume to include content from peers. Further, new networks and platforms for participation are sprouting up and going supernova overnight, with no end in sight.”

“The problem is that human attention, unlike technology, has limits. There are only so many digital inputs we can realistically pay quality attention to in our busy, multitasked lives. Demands for our attention have outstripped our finite supply of time. A crash is coming, folks. But this time it’s not financial — it’s personal.”

One of the key problems seems to be that it just keeps expanding. You’d think we’d only need so many blogs talking about, for example, business advice – but each time you log on the number has increased. Lewis Green puts it down to web 2.0’s user generated ability to defy the laws of natural selection.

“In the business world, natural selection mostly prevents that from happening, as those businesses who are most successful in reaching their customers with quality products and services that meet wants and needs live on, the rest die. That’s also true in the world of publishing, at least it was until the internet became the place where anyone can be heard, whether or not they have anything to say or whether or not they know of what they write.”

“Natural selection doesn’t seem to work in the blogosphere as most bloggers don’t blog for a profit, many if not most don’t have measurable goals to achieve, and more than a few don’t write for their readers but for themselves. So there are no set triggers to eliminate blogs and bloggers if they aren’t achieving a profit, goals or meeting the wants and needs of readers.”

I’m not a Facebook user (or a user of any friend-me service), but apparently some people are finding that their own social media friends are part of the illness, not part of the cure. The term “Spamturitis” has been coined to cover the social media plague of too much spam combined with too many time-wasting features… **poke**. Some users are weighing up the signal to noise ratios and deciding the costs exceed the benefits.

I thought I saw the light sometime last year. I started looking into a program called iGTD for the Mac, based on a self-help book called Getting Things Done by David Allen. I actually went out and bought the book, but to be honest, with the first three-quarters being devoted to getting me to buy into the idea that I needed to get things done, and repeating that hypnotically over and over (and over), I soon realised that my time would be better spent actually doing things. “The Art of Stress-Free Productivity” it said on the cover, but waiting for him to get to the point in his book sent my stress levels skyrocketing.

The website was more promising. It spoke to me in the first paragraph.

“You are a busy person aren’t you? And there’s an easy way to track all things that have to be done… and to get those things done!”

Yes indeed… bring it on! But after a month of struggling with the system I realised that more software and to-do-lists were adding to my overload, not subtracting from it. Others seem to have great success using software.

Mailing myself and carrying bundles of printouts around might be a crude system, but it’s mine and it works.

Pic: Log On by creativespark, Social Media Can Screw You Up graph by Colin McKay

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Filed under Social Media, Trends, Urban Life, Web & Technology

Tags: David Allen, digital curators, Getting Things Done, iGTD, information management, information overload, RSS feeds, RSS to email, spamturitis, T Shaped Person