
I was reading up a bit on Grails the other day & chanced to visit this post. I liked that line from Mike – “I’m never surprised by the shear magnitude of stuff I don’t know about”. So very true. In my case this is what starts the ball rolling in the first place. You hear about a new piece of technology or solution and you drill down until you have understood the concept. So far so good but while exploring new concepts, you might land into other new interesting concepts. My usual tendency is to bookmark these side concepts and attack them later. That is infact the best solution as I don’t want to deviate attention from the main problem. However these bookmarked concepts are often forgotten and essentially the understanding of the main problem remains incomplete. This is an addictive problem that I’ll christen as the “Information Hoarding” problem, a subset of the larger Information Overload problem.
Coming to the information hoarding aspect, a realization dawns that no amount of technology solutions will help here. The primary and most plausible solution – the humble “browser bookmark” concept is no use today. My Firefox bookmarks contain more than a 1000 entries and I distinctly remember that I’d bookmarked each one of them with a purpose to visit back and checkout later. But when I look back today - no way I’m gonna check out these bookmarks now. Then there are the RSS feeds designed to deliver information to me instead of I having to go and hunt for it. My feed reader (Omea Reader) shows more than a hundred unread feeds. The subjects are interesting but the thought of reading each one of them itself puts me off.
What’s worse is that the quest to keep up with the information overload problem can turn into an unhealthy habit. No wonder that the last couple of months found me staying up late and skipping on my resolutions and not to mention eating into work schedule at times too. An addiction of sorts which was in ways destroying discipline and important schedules.
So last weekend, I tried contemplating on the problem. Essentially what do we need information for? For solving problems! But today’s technology allows you to collect information at will (Google Search

That how I came up with the following rules to abide by
- Information is to be applied for a purpose, not just to be bookmarked and marked for later. So avoid the tendency to bookmark.
- Process information there-n-then. Don’t mentally save it for later. So read through articles completely and understand them. Don’t leave them for later. If you can’t – don’t fret about it. It just means you really don’t need it that urgently.
- Focus more on “Getting thing done (GTD)” than the “How to get things done (HTGTD)” syndrome.
- Let the feed reader have not more than 7 feeds in any category.
- Remember the Zen rule – “What is more important than information is what we do with that information”

Looks interesting. Will try it out
ReplyDeleteZen rule says it all. Our aim towards getting information probably helps to move in one line to achieve defined goals.
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