5 Tips for Managing Information Overload


I’m surprised when I hear people say that they are not suffering from information overload. With so much of information all around, it’d be tough to ignore the temptation of consuming more and more of it.

The important thing is to manage the flow of information in your life. Information is power, and you can’t do without it. Managing the flow is the key.

1. What are the Information Sources?

The first step towards managing and reducing information overload would be to clearly identify the information sources. It could be your cellphone, your TV, your RSS feeds — knowing how exactly you consume information everyday and how you start.

2. What’s Your Priority?

Once you’ve identified the sources, you need to identify your priorities. And accordingly, you could decide what are the sources you could do away with and which ones are essential to use everyday.

3. Manage Email

Most of you would agree that email is one of the biggest sources of information overload. Hence, keeping it in check in necessary. How? Have a look at our tips for managing email overload.

4. Manage RSS Feeds

Next in the list is RSS feeds. Being productive with RSS feeds is something which I’ve covered in detail some time ago in my tips for productive RSS news feed reading.

5. Disconnect Often

Finally, disconnecting often from the information sources, be it the computer, PC, mobile phone, iPod or any other such device, is a recommended step if you are serious about taming this beast called information.


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Abhijeet Mukherjee is the editor of Guiding Tech, a blog that publishes in-depth articles and tutorials on all things tech, including mobile news and tutorials. He's been into web working since 2008 and continues to enjoy each day of it. He loves to interact with people so hit him up on Twitter.

Discussion

  1. Great points regarding Information Overload – There is so much information out there that we fall pray to what is called ‘information overload’ i.e. ‘I should know this’, ‘I should know that’, ‘I should read that eBook’ ‘ I should download that’ etc.

    We are forever in a state of ‘starting’ and never actually ‘doing’

    First See through to completion what you have begun. You will never know Everything – and that’s fine.

    Kindest,
    Nabeel

  2. Naomi on the 28th July

    Good stuff!

  3. Felipe Martyn on the 28th July

    I have seen too many people talking about information overload and “the more wired, more tired.”

    However, I have been experiencing a lot of low quality information overload. Its being critical to find something worth my time on the web.

    I see a lot of list post with void content, and a lot of blogs vomiting others ideas just to get on the stream. So I use these same tips to fight against this excess of bad quality information.

    The problem is that we shouldnt be asked to clean up the clutter. It should be something on the tip of the tongue for all info fonts, that our time is only worth great stuff.

    • Abhijeet Mukherjee on the 29th July

      Felipe, while I agree with you that there’s a lot of information that’s not worth your time, there’s a lot of great information too. And hence the second point is important. Finding out what’s worth and prioritizing it is what’s needed.

  4. Steve Scott Site on the 30th July

    You are certainly right, fighting information overload is an ongoing battle. If you do not keep on top of things it can quickly get out of hand. I am traveling at this moment on an extended working trip. My internet time is somewhat limited in certain locations and when I miss a few days trying to catch up is like stopping an avalanche. It is much easier to handle things day by day.

  5. Thailand Reisen on the 17th May

    One thing that really helped me was to make a break every 50 minutes, and then take 2 minutes to review how effective I spend the last 50 minutes. I just wrote down all the things that took time from me, and put them on a “no list”. this way, step by step i managed to handle information overload 🙂

  6. Tomasz Banas on the 17th August

    Information overload can really destroy good company productivity. With hundreds of thousands of links it’s difficult sometimes to filter all the bad stuff. I just wrote an article about this problem – http://planmysite.com/blog/how-information-overload-influences-productivity

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