Coping with the Information Flood

Posted 5 July 2008

Many years ago, when I was writing Microprocessor Report, I read dozens of magazines a week and sifted through hundreds of printed, mailed press releases each month. It was chronically overwhelming. It’s amazing how the web has eliminated that whole world of keeping up with paper.

Of course, the electronic information flood is now far larger than the paper flood ever was. Fortunately, we have better tools for dealing with it. But I’ve found it non-trivial to find a way to use those tools that really works for me.

A couple years ago, I decided to get serious about reading the blogosphere, and I accumulated a long list of interesting feeds. This quickly became untenable, however; opening your feed reader to find 10,000 new posts is downright depressing, and leads to a quick exit. And with plenty of email every day, it was all too easy never to even get to the feed reader, especially knowing that once I went there, the flood would be overwhelming.

I started having the feeds from a few key sources emailed to me instead, and I found that this prodded me to actually read those. This approach worked for a while, until I found that I was missing too much stuff from feeds that weren’t being emailed to me, and that the emails were becoming tiresome. Among other issues, a feed reader is a much better interface to a list of posts than is an email message with a string of posts in it.

In the past few weeks, I’ve switched my approach again. I created a category in my feed reader called “Top”, and moved into that category the two-dozen or so feeds I care the most about. I stopped all feeds being emailed to me, so now I’m drawn to the feed reader each morning, as the feeds I’ve become accustomed to reading aren’t in my mail any more. And I create a sort of “feed amnesty,” setting all messages in all feeds to “read,” so I could track just the new stuff from now on.

So far, this is working really well. I at least skim all of my top feeds almost every day, and I find I can keep up with them pretty easily. And if I find myself with a little more time for news reading, I’ll dive into one of the other feed categories, with feeds that didn’t make the “top” cut. Feeds like engadget, which is interesting but not critical for me and has dozens of new posts in a typical day, I have given up on reading.

For me, a big part of this is accepting that there’s just no way I’m going to keep up with as much stuff as I’d like. What has helped me a lot is to make the decision up front—here’s what I’m going to keep up with, and here’s what I’ll keep in my feed reader but not expect to read regularly.

I also find it helpful to be ruthless about what subjects I’m going to track, and which I’m not. My top interests vary with time, but whatever they are at the moment, I try to just ignore most everything else. It’s narrowing, in a way, but for me it’s been the only way to keep up with those things that seem most important.

As for watching the Twitter stream—I have to admit I’m mostly not doing it. That’s another blog post, but for me, most of the time, getting short, frequent updates from lots of people just feels like too much information.

How do you deal with the information firehose?