Random Developments

So, how bad is it when you have to file an article on information overload into your “to read when I have time” folder?

When I realized what I had done, I became convinced that I am, indeed, overloaded with information. The aforementioned folder holds, today, 75 bookmarks, ranging on subjects from info on the Boeing 767 family to tourist information on Reykjavik, Iceland, meandering through several technical subjects in between. Do I intend to read each of these articles or websites? Well, at least I intended to, at some point. Will I ever? Probably not.

To that, I can also add the few mailing lists I subscribe to (when I left for my last vacation, I unsubscribed from most of the high-volume lists, and now I find that I don’t miss them at all), and many blogs I check on my aggregator. Again, I can’t possibly read everything that comes my way, and I don’t even seriously try to. Which is kind of frustrating.

And then there’s the daily newspaper, weekly news magazine, and monthly science and technology magazines I buy or subscribe to. And, as you can probably guess, I don’t have time to read from them all that I would like to.

However, one can ask (as I recently did): do I need all this information? Is there something vital that I will miss if I don’t receive data from all these sources? Wouldn’t I rather be doing something more useful, such as learning new things, doing something fun, even sleeping? I think we all know the answer to these questions.

So, what am I doing about this? Firstly, I admitted to myself that reading long texts off a computer screen is not only uncomfortable, it’s also distracting (after all, you’re one Alt-Tab away from material that can be more interesting). So, last week, on advice of my SO, I started printing texts and bringing them home to read them in a more comfortable setting. So far, it’s working. I know that this is not very friendly towards the environment, but it is helping me to make some headway into my reading list, and that is a good thing.

However, it is in fact somewhat ironic that most of the information I receive nowadays comes to me in form of bits, but I have to “convert” it into atoms (paper and ink) to take full advantage of it. Nicholas Negroponte would frown severely on this.

Thus, this is my new year’s resolution: to start being more in control of the information I receive and absorb. That means dumping stuff that does not interest me, and concentrating on what is actually interesting and useful. I’ll keep you posted on how I go about this.

Wish me luck.

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