Kathy provides tips how to reduce the info overload/pressure-to-keep-up stress:
- Find the best aggregators.
- Get summaries.
- Cut the redundancy!
- Unsubscribe to as many things as possible.
- Recognize that gossip and celebrity entertainment are black holes.
- Pick the categories you want for a balanced perspective, and include some from OUTSIDE your main field of interest.
- Be a LOT more realistic about what you’re likely to get to, and throw the rest out.
- In any thing you need to learn, find a person who can tell you what is: Need to know, Should know, Nice to know, Edge case, only if it applies to you specifically, or Useless.
My 2 Pence:
As a generalist genuinely interested in a lot of things, this is a challenge.
I’ve reduced the number of RSS feeds to a bare minimum. I’m using RSS to watch the comments and entries at my various sites. And to get my daily Dilbert.
I use del.icio.us to bookmark interesting sites that I find. This blog itself is also a kind of online bookmark or online scrap book, where I document links, howtos, interesting articles for future reference. I’ve started adding favorite blogs to Technorati’s faves. Although Technorati’s search is still deplorable, I’m hoping it will improve in time.
I’ve found that Gada.be is a good and fast search engine for tags.
Currently I don’t have any newspaper or magazine subscriptions. I tend to keep up with news via the web or TV. And I don’t printout web articles except when I know I won’t have access on the plane or train. I use Google alerts to keep up with news from other parts of the world.
And I agree personal contacts are really the way to find out what you need to know. And reading a book offline.
Do you have any tips? Best practices?
Regarding blogs, I like aggregators like planet* (e.g. planetweb20.com, planet.mozilla.org). Instead of checking each blog individually.
I read “Tristram Shandy” thrice, and I realized: man, that dude was right! 🙂
Kathy advocates summaries – my teachers taught me that summaries, at the highest, would help deteriorate my knowledge. Interesting development!
The “be realistic” point is most important to me. When you don’t know your limits as well as your abilities, you’re likely to get lost. And, talking of experience, if you refuse to acknoledge this, it only worsens over time.
I don’t favour the idea to split info mining among colleagues, mainly for the reason that I’ve never worked in teams where not at least one would refuse to comply and deliver their share of the whole on time and reasonably done. It’s a matter of trust, but I prefer to do things myself instead of realizing time and again that my trust has been in vain.
I am like you – interested in a lot of different areas, wanting to know how things work in detail. There was the Uomo Universale, and so I am confident that nothing is impossible. 😉