dealing with information overload
Kevin C. Tofel wants to reduce his time invested in dealing with e-mail and he asks us if we have a "unique way of managing the e-mail onslaught".
I constantly improve my way of dealing with the overall "information onslaught" by testing new technical solutions and working techniques. Some of these I already described in my blog, as for example my use of del.icio.us. If you are interested in my technical setup and personal workflow I will be glad to demonstrate these too.
The most important thing when dealing with information is a optimized personal workflow that allows you to process pieces of information very quickly and only once.
Therefore it is necessary that you choose your tools wisely and that you have to know your tools very good so that you are able to concentrate on the information and not on the tool. Your own brain is a limiting factor that should be used to it´s full extent and you should not be slowed down by the tools you are using.
You now have two of the three factors that limit your processing capability: yourself (speed of reading, thinking, deciding, ...) and your tools - these factors will not change suddenly. The third factor is the amount of time you may be able to use for processing information and this amount may vary widely.
And because of that third factor it is very important that you build some scalability into your personal information infrastructure.
I do that by using Newsfeeds wherever possible and by tagging the single feeds due to their relevance for me and my work. I then process (read) the newsfeeds not by topic but by relevance starting with the most important feeds. In times where I already know that I will not have enough time to read all my feeds or after some offline-days I even mark all feeds with the lowest ranking all as read with one single click.
With e-mail I do have a similar technique by tagging e-mail due to the sender and/or the e-mail-adress since I use unique adresses at my own mail-domains for most of the people sending e-mail to me. In Gmail I do have over 60 filters that preprocess my incoming e-mail for me by setting tags and stars or skipping the inbox, so that I only have to manually process about half of all incoming mail in the first step.
The next steps in improving my workflow depend largely on Google since I do hope that they soon will add some task-list feature (based on base for example) and that they will go to a object oriented workstyle that does not longer separate e-mails from appointments from tasks from contacts...
I constantly improve my way of dealing with the overall "information onslaught" by testing new technical solutions and working techniques. Some of these I already described in my blog, as for example my use of del.icio.us. If you are interested in my technical setup and personal workflow I will be glad to demonstrate these too.
The most important thing when dealing with information is a optimized personal workflow that allows you to process pieces of information very quickly and only once.
Therefore it is necessary that you choose your tools wisely and that you have to know your tools very good so that you are able to concentrate on the information and not on the tool. Your own brain is a limiting factor that should be used to it´s full extent and you should not be slowed down by the tools you are using.
You now have two of the three factors that limit your processing capability: yourself (speed of reading, thinking, deciding, ...) and your tools - these factors will not change suddenly. The third factor is the amount of time you may be able to use for processing information and this amount may vary widely.
And because of that third factor it is very important that you build some scalability into your personal information infrastructure.
I do that by using Newsfeeds wherever possible and by tagging the single feeds due to their relevance for me and my work. I then process (read) the newsfeeds not by topic but by relevance starting with the most important feeds. In times where I already know that I will not have enough time to read all my feeds or after some offline-days I even mark all feeds with the lowest ranking all as read with one single click.
With e-mail I do have a similar technique by tagging e-mail due to the sender and/or the e-mail-adress since I use unique adresses at my own mail-domains for most of the people sending e-mail to me. In Gmail I do have over 60 filters that preprocess my incoming e-mail for me by setting tags and stars or skipping the inbox, so that I only have to manually process about half of all incoming mail in the first step.
The next steps in improving my workflow depend largely on Google since I do hope that they soon will add some task-list feature (based on base for example) and that they will go to a object oriented workstyle that does not longer separate e-mails from appointments from tasks from contacts...
OAndreas - 23. Dez, 14:38
