Productivity and Information Overload

Image by Will Lion on Flickr via Creative Commons

I work in IT. I spend a lot of my time on the Internet. I love gadgets. I love new technology. The question is, does all this technology help us or is it really holding us back? I personally spend a lot of time messing about with technology and not really achieving anything. Whilst this is fine, as essentially it is one of my many hobbies, I do often have to take a step back and wonder if what I am doing is a productive use of my time. When I say a productive use of my time I mean it what I am doing putting my precious time to the best use to reach my ultimate goals (the end game)?

Whilst obviously it is essential to spend time on your interests (what’s the point of living if you aren’t doing what you want to do), we must review to make sure that we aren’t doing things just for the sake of doing them, and more to the point not kidding ourselves that messing around with our ‘systems’ ‘workflows’ and ‘lists’ is actually productive use of time.

I have found that the more technology and systems available to me, the more information overload I have. I can’t get enough information sometimes and I often find that I don’t want to discard a piece of information until I have got the most out of it. This could be reading it, committing it to memory, filing it for possible later use or sharing it with other people who might find the information useful.

For example, at the moment I am spending quite a lot of time redeveloping my system for holding, organising, using and storing the mountain of information I come across on any given day. I’d say that over 90% of this information comes from being connected. It could be a new blog, a search that I have done on a particular topic and found 10 links I want to follow up on or something that a fellow twitterer has suggested. Whilst systems (such as GTD) are great for organising and storing information, without a execution plan (the actual doing rather than just collecting) your pile (albeit digital) of information to digest just continues to grow. 18 months ago I don’t thing that I had this mountain of information to deal with. I wasn’t clued up on social media, blogs and productivity. However, I probably did have a similar amount of information to deal with I perhaps just didn’t realise that I did or wasn’t so worried about it as I wasn’t clued up on ‘being productive’.

Tim Ferriss suggests going on a low information diet. This is a brilliant Idea and I have applied that principle(at least in part) by cutting down my RSS feeds, and only going on the internet to look for information when I need it. The problem I have is that I am interested in a lot of things and Google and the answer to my endless questions is only a click away.

I do enjoy learning something new every day and being knowledgeable on a given topic, but sometimes I need to take a step back, not gather any new information and process the information I have. My new system that I am working on serves two main purposes therefore:

1. Efficient capture, storage and relevance of information.
2. Efficient execution of action with the information relevant to my goals and progression.

So my system is a work in progress. I don’t think I’ll ever stop tweaking it, but for now it’s back to my bookmarklets (my latest favourite geek toy) and organising the wealth of information I have whilst being ruthless with the deletes and taking action against those things that are going to make a difference.