Information overload – something that is very real when you are in the tech industry. One way to manage this and solve this problem is to simply ignore it completely. For instance, don’t read RSS feeds, don’t have a twitter account, poke into your email inbox once in a while to see if anything new and interesting is in there and use your inbox as a way of reminding yourself of things that you have to do.
Maybe there isn’t anything wrong with this approach. These people tend to live outside of technology and run their lives from conversations and what they have on their mind that they believe is the right thing to do at any one time. You quite often wouldn’t hear back from them if you sent them a message – so you may need to rely on ringing them for a definite response, which can be frustrating. But as I said, maybe there isn’t anything wrong with it. People just operate differently – and that’s fine, we just have to acknowledge that people do things differently and we have to change our approach to fit with how others go about doing business depending on who we are dealing with. You can’t make the world conform to you, unfortunately. (For example, I wish more people used twitter which I think is a great tool. The uptake in Australia / New Zealand is poor even between tech people, but there is not much you can do except maybe wait :)
I’ve decided myself that I don’t want to simply block/ignore information as a way of surviving, but I also don’t want to be swamped by it, so over the years I’ve been trying to refine my daily workflow process in an attempt to manage “information flow” (a.k.a information overload) effectively and efficiently. It’s based a lot of GTD (Getting Things Done) which I highly recommend anyone read – the book is obviously written in fairly general terms (so everyone can benefit) and it’s really left to everyone to find their own concrete “implementation” of it. The concepts you come to realise in the book really turn on a few light bulbs that help you go forward with for the rest of your life. David Allen has since written a sequel to this book, “Making It All Work” which is definitely on my to-read list.
Through trial and error I’ve tried a few different things but am starting to get to the point now where I am pretty happy with the whole process – although I think it will always be a continually evolving thing, especially as your life changes. I have mentioned the tools that I am using to implement the process also, but tools always change too – even more so than the process. I realise that there are many other valid tool alternatives out there and new ones are always cropping up – this is just to document what I’m using right now.
My Daily Workflow
Diagram Explanation
“Stuff” is everything that bombards you from day to day.
- Email – I tend to just process these throughout the day. For people who feel a sense of email overwhelm though, some suggest disabling automatic send/receive and processing these at certain times of the day (to avoid distractions). I believe in “inbox zero” philosophy – where read emails do not sit in your inbox. Once read, a decision is made whether it is deleted, it requires an action that is done right there (i.e a reply < 2 mins), converted to an action (or put in a @ToReply folder), delegated, filed, or deleted. The key concept is that e-mail is simply a mode of transport, nothing more and that the inbox isn’t for storage. I also make use of the MS Outlook follow up function for sent emails where you want a reminder where it is important that you receive a reply.
- RSS Feeds – These are a great way of keeping up with what’s happening out there in the world around you, especially with technology. There is a problem with them though – they are overwhelming, especially as your number of subscriptions go up (I’m at 233 subscriptions right now which I actually quite easily keep on top of). If you don’t read them for a week – you are more and more disinclined to want to even look at them because of the share number of updates. I use Google Reader which I have in “list” mode – this is where you only see the titles of each post. I also have each feed in an appropriate category. What I do now is literally spent 5-10 minutes of the day in the mornings (sometimes less) going through each category and scanning the titles. If one interests me, I may expand it and have a quick read – if it’s something that will take a bit more involvement to read (and I still want to read it) I will add it to ReadItLater with its Google Reader plug in. Aside from that, I will simply hit the “Mark all as read” button. That way if there is something really good, or something new going on – you will see it, but you aren’t going to spend your life reading RSS feeds. Important difference! I’ve recently added the free MobileRSS application to my iPod Touch that syncs with Google Reader and allows you to read offline, as well as add items directly to ReadItLater.
- Facebook / Twitter – I manage both these through TweetDeck, but especially for twitter. At the moment I still tend to prefer the facebook webpage interface in conjunction with www.fbpurity.com in order to hide all those farmville and fortune cookie requests etc. Nevertheless it’s still handy to be able to see updates from TweetDeck if you wish. You can manage the level of notifications you want TweetDeck to give you – depending on what sort of distractibility level you want. You can filter a twitter “column” for example for your close friends that will display a full popup notification, and have the rest display a smaller notification or none at all. Things like that. I also use Echofon on the iPod touch for twitter processing.
- Life – Life of course has many other inputs, phone calls, random thoughts, talking with people etc. The main notion with GTD is to keep things out of your head and stored in one location – where you can review everything in context with everything else. If you try to keep everything in your head you will feel stressed, constantly be thinking about things in order to “remember” them, and become less effective.
The key point to the process is - every input requires a decision to be made, right there and then.
Is it somewhere I need to be?
Then the calendar is where it goes and then the item deleted. A lot of events are organised through facebook these days so I make use of the “Export” functionality on the facebook event page that takes it straight through and into Outlook as an appointment.
Is it something that I need to do something with – i.e an Action?
If not, I decide whether I want to trash it, or store it somewhere for future reference. Where I store this depends on what it is. If it’s a bit of paper it will go in my filing cabinet, an electronic file on my file system (backed up with DropBox if it’s non-media), stored as a reference item in MyLifeOrganized (which I will talk more about soon), in an email subdirectory if it’s an email, or if it’s a link I will use Delicious to store it, which will then sync back to a few pages on this site. If it’s a web article that I want to read (which may or may not result in a further action) but don’t have the time right now, I add it to ReadItLater. Once upon a time I let this grow to over 100 items. This is bad. Very bad. Like the RSS feeds that you leave to fester, you will never want to look at this list if it is this big. I keep these processed and back down to 0 weekly the best I can.
If this item is something that I need to do something with, GTD philosophy is to do it right then if I can do it in less than 2 minutes. Otherwise, it is going in my “to-do” list and prioritised alongside everything else. For this I have been using MyLifeOrganized. This tool is very flexible and there are many ways in which you can use it. I have taken to using a combination of Weekly/Monthly/Yearly goals as well as Contexts (another GTD term).
My first decision is what goal I should assign to the item:
- Week – Items assigned a weekly goal are essentially the ones that I have in view each day. This isn’t a hard goal where I punish myself if don’t have them all done by the end of the week, but allow them to roll over. It’s more of a focus thing than anything else. For agile methodologists, I guess this is more like the Kanban/Lean way of doing things with flow rather than Scrum’s fixed iterations. For work projects though I think fixed iterations are still good.
- Month – Items which will most likely become weekly goals within a month (or two). There is still a sense of time importance with these.
- Year – Items that I really don’t need to think about for quite a while, still want to do at some point but definitely have on the back burner right now.
- Downtime – For items that I don’t assign a Week/Month/Year goal, I have set these up to be visible in a view I call Downtime. These are typically tasks that are non-important and non-urgent – but still things that you would probably do before Year goals. Could be things that you can do while watching TV and may tend to be more @Fun – it does not matter if these are not done in any particular time frame.
Doing this is a way of prioritising what you think is important for you to be looking at and what should be shielded from your thoughts for now.
The next step is to set a context on the item. These are very personalised in my opinion. Everyone is going to have these looking different. The GTD book suggests these are things like @Phone, @Car, @Shops, @Home, @Work…. You get the picture. The idea being you filter the list based on the context you are in at the time. At this stage in my life I didn’t find much benefit from this so my contexts at the moment are more to do with the area of my life they belong in (which still helps me choose items off the list when they are grouped this way). It’s all very flexible, these vary a lot depending on your lifestyle.
MyLifeOrganized operates by allowing you to define different “views” on your master all encompassing task list. I have created a week view that displays anything that has a weekly goal assigned to it, or any item that is now “due” with the due date property (the items are also grouped by the context I assigned to them). The monthly view shows all monthly goal items and the yearly view in this case I have grouped by project, another GTD/MyLifeOrganized concept (projects are made up of tasks).
I essentially only ever have the weekly view open at any one time (or maybe the Downtime list depending on the time of day / energy levels), unless I’m doing a “weekly review” which is an important GTD task conducted weekly where you look over all of your items. This is where I shuffle weekly / monthly / yearly goals to make sure my weekly list is current. It is important to empty anything that you have on your mind into the system at this point so it is all there in front of you to view and prioritise alongside everything else.
It sounds complicated but I’m feeling quite effective now. I would be delighted to hear how other people go about dealing with “stuff” in case there is something I can borrow and use myself :) We are all in this fight against this world that’s heading for information overload meltdown together :) I believe, with the right simple process that you eventually internalise and don’t need to think about, it becomes quite easy to manage information without having to block it out entirely.
Note that I’m not necessarily saying that you should use or invest in any of the tools that I have mentioned in this article. I just wanted to share what I’m currently doing with the idea that it might give you (the reader) some ideas about how you could tweak your own setup. Everyone’s circumstances / lives are different and everyone is going to want to do things slightly differently. This article just gives you my version :)