i’m not sure what’s happened these last few weeks….i’m generally a high media-rate guy — i consume a ton of books, a ton of television, a ton of news feeds, and i generally get my e-mail inbox to something under 10 messages before i go to bed each night.
but something’s happened over just the last few weeks, and i’m drowning now. i literally have 30 books on my nightstand that are all interesting & that i want to read (both novels & non-fiction). i have probably 30 hours on my tivo at home (including all 14 of The War, which i’ve got to get psyched up to watch eventually — maybe over the holidays).
e-mail load & face-to-face meeting load are both super-high now. i’m probably tracking 500 news posts a day, and i’m keeping an eye on by facebook feed (mostly with my iphone using their very very good iphone implementation when i’m waiting to meet friends for lunch), and my new friendfeed stream, which is getting increasingly fun to watch.
but i don’t know. i think there may be too much, and i’m starting to feel like i need new tools to watch streams of things go by. (article-oriented newsreaders don’t seem right; web pages with lists don’t seem right; IMs don’t seem right.)
i’m not 100% sure what to do about it, other than ride it out and see if it gets better or i get better at triaging & managing. i don’t really think that i want to do what some other folks have done (like declaring e-mail bankruptcy or anything like that) — but i don’t quite know how to think about the problem anymore. maybe it’s the normal end-of-summer mania?
i’ll try to write more this weekend about it — try to capture all the ways information is coming in & out, and the rhythms of each.
anyone else feeling like this?
John's Blog 
Hells, yes.I basically calculate that – without lunch and coffee breaks – I have 3 hours of an average workday in which I can actually sit down and work. It doesn’t give a lot of time for reflective thought, and that bothers me a little.I’ll be interested to hear what you have to say. There’ve been a lot of good lifehackerish posts on how to manage information, but so far, for me, it’s come down to an art of skimming and trying to pick up on patterns in my various in and outboxes.
Hells, yes.
I basically calculate that – without lunch and coffee breaks – I have 3 hours of an average workday in which I can actually sit down and work. It doesn’t give a lot of time for reflective thought, and that bothers me a little.
I’ll be interested to hear what you have to say. There’ve been a lot of good lifehackerish posts on how to manage information, but so far, for me, it’s come down to an art of skimming and trying to pick up on patterns in my various in and outboxes.
I only vaguely remember the Before Time when what you describe was not the norm for me. Hmmmm, don’t suppose it could have anything to do with your brain being full from being COO, the International travel and, oh yeah, how old is your boy now 🙂
I only vaguely remember the Before Time when what you describe was not the norm for me. Hmmmm, don’t suppose it could have anything to do with your brain being full from being COO, the International travel and, oh yeah, how old is your boy now 🙂