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Topic: Managing Information Overload
| Author | Message |
| Shasta | Posted – 12/15/2007 2:17:54 AM | show profile How do you manage the sheer volume of info out there? It's a Catch-22. I feel guilty either way. Either not reading enough or spending too much time. What is on your morning must read? While each industry is different, what is the best stratety for efficient, yet comprehensive info. |
| dribbledrive1 | Posted – 12/15/2007 4:21:11 AM | show profile Sure, there's a tremendous amount of info out there, but how much of it do any of us really need? Most mornings, I don't read anything. I can go days without looking at the news, because most of the news comes and goes without affecting me. Once or twice a week, I read a few magazines. I rarely look at the newspaper. |
| Sam Waynewright | Posted – 12/15/2007 5:25:36 PM | show profile Managing Information Overload " I can go days without looking at the news, because most of the news comes and goes without affecting me. " It's that kind of misguided thinking that got this country saddled with a moron for president. Twice. |
| writesonwater | Posted – 12/16/2007 1:53:51 AM | show profile You may be right as to what got us in a mess ... Have you seen the survey that linked state IQ averages to votes in past federal election? The lower the IQ averages, the more likely theywere to vote for Bush. As for the president, I expect higher levels of literacy and intellect than I see in the present administration. I subscribe to the local big daily, in part because I freelance for it. I glance over headlines. I avoid TV news except in major breaking news situations. I catch quite a bit by being online. But it can be overload because so much of it's bad news that we can't immediately do anything about ... |
| Sam Waynewright | Posted – 12/16/2007 4:33:09 PM | show profile Managing Information Overload Of course we all have limited time, so we need to be mindful of what news we watch or read. The main problem with news in this country -- TV, radio and print media -- is that is extremely narrowly focused on the US as if we are the only people on the planet. 100, 50 or even 20 years ago that might have been fine, but today with global warming, the globel economy, international criminal (aka "terrorist") networks we ignore the rest of the world at our peril. If you ever wonder what is happening in the rest of the world (and yes, there is more to the world than our involvement in Iraq), I'd strongly suggest that you get the BBC evening news (7pm EST) which in just 20 minutes gives you a wonderful round-up of all the world's important events of that day; sans all the bullship about the latest pop star's career ascent or descent. Re your point about that survey. I heard about another one several years ago which revealed that those starts which had the smallest budgets for school systems - Mississippi, Alabama, Texas, Louisiana...were also the strongest supporters of George W. Bush, in both elections. These are the same poor people whom Bush has been using as cannon fodder in his wars of choice. |
| xpress | Posted – 12/16/2007 7:52:48 PM | show profile try building an igoogle account. I put all my favorite sites on igoogle, and it automatically feeds the headlines when they get posted on my favorite news sitea. This way I can scan headlines and read what I find important. |
| Upward Bound | Posted – 12/16/2007 8:58:47 PM | show profile Not to nitpick, but IQ is completely independent of the breadth of a person's reading material. And, last time I checked, democracy was designed to apply equally to a country's population. Not that anyone suggested this, but the less intellectual among us are entitled to the same vote as the ivy-educated. We're a country full of diverse people and, I'm sorry if the end result of our democracy doesn't suit your personal preferences perfectly, but that's what a democracy is. Count yourselves lucky that we have it better than those living in many of the world's less democratic (and less developed) countries. Hop on a plane and get some perspective! Once you've witnessed first-hand how some of the world's less fortunate people have lived, you'll realize that you have to take the bad with the good and you'll start to appreciate the good a little more. |
| dribbledrive1 | Posted – 12/16/2007 11:06:45 PM | show profile To each his own. --Managing Information Overload " I can go days without looking at the news, because most of the news comes and goes without affecting me. " It's that kind of misguided thinking that got this country saddled with a moron for president. Twice.[-[ |
| Thabit | Posted – 12/17/2007 7:23:44 AM | show profile RSS I get one paper daily and subscribe to a ton of RSS newsfeeds, the essentials (NYT , moreover feeds for topics I cover) including all the "most read" or "most emailed," of these... I've also got a bunch of non-essentials (gawker, salon) at the bottom. If I'm in a rush, I just scan the headlines of the first ones... |
| caitlinkelly | Posted – 12/17/2007 1:07:26 PM | show profile Sam W makes an important point. I listen to BBC World News on radio for 60 minutes every morning whenever possible (9-10:00 a.m. in NY on WNYC) and routinely hear stories there weeks or months before - if ever - major American media get to them. I think everyone's must-read is pretty individual. When I'm working on multiple stories to tight deadlines, I'll scan headlines to make sure I haven't missed an update to the story I'm working on and save papers for a few days or more to read them more carefully, NYT, WSJ and WashPost weekly. |
| Sam Waynewright | Posted – 12/17/2007 2:50:27 PM | show profile Managing Information Overload A case in point of how ill served we are by US media -- the global warming conference held in Bali involved the entire world and was reported extensively everyday in overseas print and broadcast media, including the fact that, essentually only China and the US refused to agree to binding environmental guidelines to stem the problem in the decades ahead. Think about that --- one of the world's most polluted and environmenally most irresponsible nations in the world, and we side with them, against over 100 other nations. This lead to consistent jeering and booing at the US deligation by hundreds of other national deligations. Yet virtually none of this showed up in any detail on US TV or print media. Thanks to the current state of the American media the average American looks at the world the way that a frog looks at the sky from the bottom of a well. |
| Metro Writer | Posted – 12/18/2007 10:09:19 AM | show profile I click on www.nytimes.com and scan My Times, which has a brief paragraph on today's news in the Times, Yahoo, and BBC. Look for sites that offer news feeds in areas that you write about (e.g., business, science, medical news, etc.) to keep you informed of breaking stories. Even though you are busy, you must take the time to read good writing, such as articles in The New Yorker. If you read junk, you will write junk. |
| pentup | Posted – 12/21/2007 4:28:32 PM | show profile I listen to NPR every morning for about an hour as I'm getting ready for work -- and also a bit of NPR/BBC in the evening. This helps me to hear a lot of the top stories of the day without all the celeb reports/news of the odd (cat saves family from carbon monoxide poisoning!)/commercials. It's not that I don't think there's a time and place for that stuff, but in the morning I just want the headlines and a little bit of insight, which I think Morning Edition does really well. It gives me a good framework for sorting through the rest of the information that comes my way. |
| Shasta | Posted – 12/26/2007 10:18:41 PM | show profile Managing Information Overload Good insights, though it became a bit more politcal than I intended. Thanks. |
| chucho | Posted – 12/27/2007 8:43:34 AM | show profile Google Reader is pretty darn good for a quick browse of information. Theoretically you could set up Google Reader so that everything you think you must read is collected for easy & quick browsing at one location (in an "in-box" gmail format). Then everything else you browse online becomes superfluous time-wasting. So if you feel overloaded but want to stay informed you can simply swear off anything that isn't feeding into your Reader. Then you take the process even further (a filter of the filter). I use "star" and "share" messages as an additional "bookmark" -- I "star" anything that I might want to read. Then I "share" anything that I must read, but can't read at that moment. This "sharing" and "starring" is so that even if my Reader feeds are overwhelming I'll just scan and star or share relevant links. (Star them if you think you want to read them but aren't sure at that moment then "share" items you must read to your "shared items" URL so that your shared items URL is your "absolutely positively must read these items" web page. Be sure to set the Reader NOT to "mark as read" automatically (that's the default setting). That way you're sure to be able to see everything quickly but they remain unread until you've scanned them. Then I mark all of them as unread once I've scanned (and rejected), starred or shared each item. Then once you've scanned (and marked items you must read) your latest "unread" items, you can "mark all current items as read" and then your Reader is cleaned out of new items. Check back later, repeat the process. This is far less time consuming than visiting a bunch of sites and more powerful an editable than a simple RSS feed. It sounds complicated here, but basically you can set up Reader to collect items and then you can send them to reader web pages automatically. Then you just bookmark those pages. I think this is the future of the Internet (since there's so much garbage out there) -- highly customizable, automated information feeds. If you do this once a day, you're "shared items" URL becomes the filter -- the stuff there you must read; everything else is optional. The time it takes to scan new items every day depends on how many feeds you have going to your reader. |
