Different Perspective On Information Overload

Everyone talks about information overload. There is more than enough information available. Its time and attention that are in short supply. I have been reading much more from Stowe Boyd recently and he discusses a few thoughts about the concept of information overload that will make you think. Probably my favorite quote on the subject:

How do jugglers juggle? They don't focus on the balls, the movements, or timing. They unfocus: it is a field of all three dimensions and their attention is distributed. Good jugglers can also sing or tell jokes while juggling. Unfocus.

He also talks about how we can think about Time as 'Flow Time':

Flow (Lived) time: we are in the unending moment through which everything flows -- Piaget and others have noted that time dilates: sometimes it goes fast, sometimes it zooms. When you are in the zone, the tennis (base, soccer, basket) ball seems to slow down and there is plenty of time to get into the right position, without consciously thinking of it.

Flow Strategies: (I like #3)

1. Time is a shared space -- your time is truly not your own
   
2. Productivity is second to Connection: network productivity trumps personal productivity
   
3. Everything important will find it’s way to you many, many times: don’t worry if you miss it
   
4. Remain in the flow: be wrapped up in the thing that has captured your attention

Some of the concepts Stowe presents are a little mind-bending. How do they reshape the way you think about business or even your own personal life?

Personal Information Aggregation

When the internet first came out the problem was finding what you wanted. Then search started to evolved, as more and more content came online in the form of web pages. Browser bookmarks became the tool of choice. Then at some point information overload started to occur and people wanted to find tools to find and filter. Search got better, RSS came on the scene, and a plethora of tools to help you sift through the growing information haystack came on the scene and continue to do so today. Tagging tools, feed readers, personalized home pages, widgets, etc etc. We are now at a point where we even need filters for our filters, or ways to collect and better assimilate out of our various filter points. I can't tell you how many times I am in a conversation, and I remember a an interesting topic I read recently, but cannot pinpoint where it was that I saw it - was it in my rss reader, as i scanned the backlog quickly, and if it was - what blog was it from... did i flag it, tag it and post to delicious? Was it an amazon review, or just something that somebody emailed to me?

At one point I had this idea for a personal web based data warehouse - a place in which you could store content, pointers and references, that could be categorized, tagged and it would work seamlessly across files on my hardrive as well as the web and accessible from any point, and it would 'learn' my interests and start looking for other items that match what interests me. It would also allow me to connect ideas to formulate new ideas.

To my knowledge this doesn't exist, but I have recently come across Google Notebook from Google Labs. I am finding it to be very useful at least for information aggregation. It gives me a tool to capture snippets from blog posts, websites or anything online and it brings the URL with it. You can create different notebooks which can be shared out, and within notebooks create different tabs, and its online, accessible any location and searchable with Google's powerful search engine. Yes its not perfect but its free and will likely evolve with more features. I quickly created a notebook for work related topics which I shared with a colleague. I also created a personal notebook with tabs including 'items I want to blog about', 'items that I find, but want to read later', etc. If you are looking for something new to try to help manage your information overload check it out, and let me know if you have found other useful information aggregation tools. (be aware - it doesn't work with the new IE 7)

Our Mental Hard Drive

This is a great visual about information, and how much of it we see every day. Think about what this means - We see 1MB of information every second. This is only going to increase. What is the capacity for your mental hard drive? What is it for your customers? How do you make the best use of their limited capacity. Although this may seem dismal to marketers, In some ways I feel that the increased volume of content, is allowing the human brain to reach a great potential for information consumption. And now, as we develop new and better external tools to help us categorize and filter, it also allows our own hard drives to re-configure how it remembers things.

By the way check out lynetters other visual quotation images on Flickr - Just like this image, they will likely make you re-think your business.