I resume teaching today so pressure on me to live a more structured existence. Less time to spend roaming the Web, posting to this site and reading/posting to other blogs. I've been busy trying to catch up with a mounting stack of books and with a number of refereeing and (tedious) administrative tasks.
As with most people I periodically suffer from 'information overload'. Apart from the Web there are online and hard copy daily/weekly newspapers and magazines that I read even apart from the professional publications that I must read. I find the weekly Economist and NewScientist magazines essential reading - mainly for pleasure - and prefer the hard copy versions. But it all takes time. I can't substitute away from television as I now watch little and I need to give family and work high commitments.
How to you manage information overload? How do you prevent it from reducing your effectiveness? If you have comments on this, on blogging generally or, indeed, on any issue that interests you I'd like to hear them.
Over to you.
Wednesday, March 01, 2006
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3 comments:
good question Harry.
I do like the economist as well.
both business and pleasure.
I suspect roaming the web wil be part of your job soon re- research topics. john quiggin's blog is almost part of his job for example
We have to make choices and we do.
Tools like RSS feed aggregators make it possible to do more online in shorter periods of time. Managing the rest, well, it is just discipline and priorities...same as it's always been.
I'm from La Trobe too by the way.
I take inspiration from the old architects' guideline: when space is short, make sure all items in the space have at least two alternate uses ... I bought a flash-based 2gb mp3 player a while ago. I mostly use it for podcasts from the ABC, NY Times, NPR, various lecture series, and books from audible.com. I am hanging out for The Economist to come in podcast format, but meanwhile the combination of the mp3 player and a good set of sports headphones allows me to catch up on a lot of my 'reading' while commuting, running errands, occasional walks of the dog, etc... I use Juice to receive all of my podcast feeds and thus am less likely to be sidetracked exploring the many podcasts that are now available. The capacity and portability of the mp3 player also means I can intersperse my 'reading' with returns to music recordings that I haven't listened to for a long time .... it helps to return the rushed life to the good life. Truly best US$120 I have spent in a long time!
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