Information overload - Blog meltdown

I read this article from called the Myth of keeping up there is also an article from Coding Horror which is on the same thing but called Just in time Learning if I was to give it a chirpy name I would call it Technical Blogdown (instead of meltdown).

There is obviously more information that you can read floating around the internet and more blogs than you can shake a stick at. It is a battle to try and read the stuff you will find interesting but without having to wade through loads and loads of blogs, articles, podcasts, presentations and books.

I think one thing that makes things easier is blog aggregators, you can just have a quick look at the title of the blog entry to see if you want to read it. I have recently been trying to unsubscribe from things I need and are just clogging up my rss reader. I think you need a zero tolerance approach, if an rss feed gives you an excuse to unsubscribe do it. I think you need to look at the emails you have signed up to and the blogs and podcasts and think do I really get much from this. Any ones you aren't sure about, get rid of it, you can always subscribe again later on.

This is the same with articles, don't just print any one you think might be useful, wait until you find one that is really useful. Only print one article out at a time and put then put any new ones into a delicious or something similar.

I have been using Delicious recently to help me put things I think might be interesting. For some reason it doesn't seem like as much of an effort to log it in delicious and delete it or read it. Don't fall into the trap of putting to much junk in Delicious or some other link holder.

One of the best pieces of advice from Kathy Seirra is

"Unsubscribe from as many things as possible"

This is something that I have been trying to do to try and get rid of the clutter and information overload.

good luck with your mission if you choose to accept it.