Author Clay Johnson believes that, much like junk food leads to obesity and health problems, junk information is killing our productivity and efficiency, and worse, feeding ignorance. His new book, The Information Diet, discusses this problem in depth. In this post, Johnson details how to kickstart your Information Diet for 2012. More »
As founder and CEO of security software developer Kaspersky Lab and a frequent traveller, Eugene Kasperksy could also find himself drowning in email and stuck on antisocial phone calls. How does he avoid that fate? More »
We’re surrounded by gadgets that demand our attention, constantly fragmenting our ability to properly focus on the task at hand. Living with technology doesn’t mean we have to live with an addiction, however. Here’s how to beat tech burnout. More »
The New York Times’ Bits Blog asked its readers to give up their main technological tethers — be they SMS messages, Twitter, email or other inputs. You can watch intriguing videos of how they coped, but also take away a neat lesson. More »
When you discover a new web comic (or other cool online publication), it’s fatally easy to waste hours catching up on the older material. Archive Binge tempers that tendency by automatically feeding older entries into your preferred RSS reader. More »
Technologist Clay Shirky argues that information overload isn’t the problem tech journalism makes it out to be: it’s really a failure of information filters. At the Web 2.0 Expo last week, Shirky said that the internet has made it easier and cheaper for publishers to broadcast information—so now the onus is on the consumer to filter out the noise (much like client-side spam filters). Hit the play button after the jump to hear Shirky’s well-argued points.
Running a web site that pumps out almost 20 posts a day about how to be more productive, we’re already aware of the irony of technology that tries to fix the problems that technology presents. The New York Times gets hip to the Catch-22 in an article today on the firms and software applications out to stem the tide of information overload that this field has created: “There’s a competitive advantage of figuring out how to address this problem,” [IBM researcher John]Tang said. He said that there was “a certain amount of irony” in the fact that the solutions are coming from the very companies that built the digital systems in the first place.
Philipp Lenssen, who’s normally blogging about Google products and developments, sent a single question to workers at some of the country’s top tech firms on how they deal with all the email, feeds, voicemail, and other clatter clamoring for their attention. The answers are informative and, in some cases, pretty surprising. Elinor Mills, reporter at CNET, talks about her reasonable “triage” approach: I scan email and see what needs immediate attention, set aside things that can wait and then go back to them in order of importance, hoping that none of them expires in the meantime … I scan the RSS and iGoogle headlines several times a day. It is overwhelming the amount of information that gets thrust at you every day all day, especially in the daily news business. I also make a lot of lists of ideas to pursue and stories I’m working on to try to stay on top of it.
