Sometimes I get to a point where I can’t clear my head, and it effects every part of my life. It prevents me from sleeping. Eating. Laughing. Learning. Growing. Thinking. Even makes me have trouble breathing as more and more e-mails/DMs/IMs/texts/voicemails go unchecked. Information overload to the MAX.
I’ve reached this point before, but unfortunately last time around I didn’t get enough online housekeeping taken care of, so it was only a matter of time before I ended back here again. I partially blame my lag time on the cross country move, the holidays and starting a new job (which I acknowledge all as major things). But even taking all of that into consideration, I have to believing working in the social media and public relations space, I mount myself with way more information that the average American.
According to LukeW Ideation and Design (which I totally didn’t look into the validity of the source because that would have required me to do research and digest more information, so take this information and do with it what you will PLUS it’s from October 2009, so it’s old school by now anyway) the average Data Consumption for an American is:
- The average American consumes 34 gigabytes of content and 100,000 words (cross our eyes and ears) of information in a single day. (source)
So what do I do? I mean, I’ve been here before? How do I ensure that I won’t be back here, breathless and confused, in just a few short weeks? Where do I cut back?
While I don’t know this is the best approach here’s what I’m going to try to help clear my mind:
1. File my freaking e-mail. I have 1603 e-mails that are eagerly awaiting my review, most of which (let’s be honest), I’m never going to look at. So setting up more filters nowwww….and done.
2. Block some of those dadgum applications on Facebook. I seriously can’t look at one more Farmville notification. I mean, like for real.
3. Setting up more lists on my Twitter stream. While I was inspired by my friend Micah’s post about unfollowing folks that aren’t contributing to your needs, I’m of the belief that I followed those folks at some point for some reason, so I’ll just keep them there for awhile. At least until they say something to prove otherwise. Beware.
4. Better regiment my daily blog/news reading. Which will probably require paying attention to my RSS reader at some point. Oh man, that’s going to be a huge undertaking…..maybe that will wait.
5. Spend more time focusing on the things that I’m interested in or could have an impact on my clients/profession later on. I give up a lot of time online reading articles that I don’t find interesting, and don’t provide me with skills to grow. Probably how many of you are feeling about this blog post right now. 
Okay, so, I’m going to get through this right? I’m going to regroup and skinny the info down at some point, yes?…Please…help?
The basic concept of my post was that all information is not good. People are fine but the content produced by people can be overwhelming. Its important to separate the people from the information/content.
Its better to consume and respond to the information that is important to making your relationships (be they personal or professional) stronger and grow.
We seem to take pride in the amount of information that we consume, even when that information forces us to take shortcuts and frankly, share less of ourselves.
At the end of the day, information should be about making life easier or better. If it doesnt, then stop consuming it. After all, its just words. It has no feelings.
I guess I should have added:
I challenge you to:
1) delete or mark as read all email older than 30 days;
2) you have 3000 followers and follow 1900 people. I challenge you to unfollow 10% – ~200 people. I have a private list of people that I like to follow more closely. Does that mean I dont care what the rest of the folks are saying? No, I just dont add people unless I feel they are adding value (BTW, thats why I only have 8000 followers even though I started #followfriday. If I followed everyone back, I would have thousands more)
3) delete any feed that hasnt been updated in 30 days. Delete any feed you havent read in 30 days. Google Reader will give you all that data.
Be overly harsh with your cuts. You will find that you will start missing twitter folks or RSS feeds, or Facebook games, etc. then rebuild slowly.
You might find that the noise turns to signal.