lifedoodling sketching between the lines of life

Managing Information Overload In the Age of Twitter and iPhones

Today I woke up and chec­ked the weather.  Then I loo­ked at the over­seas mar­kets and inter­na­tio­nal head­li­nes for finan­cial infor­ma­tion.  I did this without get­ting out of bed on my iPhone, of course.  This is a fairly nor­mal ritual for me these days.  By 6:30AM every mor­ning I have gau­ged what my boys day is going to be like based on the weather, and what my day is going to be like based on my Bloom­berg feeds. 

After the ritua­lis­tic rush of get­ting the boys dres­sed, break­fast star­ted, and myself clea­ned and ready for work I check my email.  Then my rss and finally twit­ter feeds.  It’s a huge volume of infor­ma­tion and it can send me into hyper­fo­cus hell if I’m not care­ful.  I have lite­rally been sit­ting in my car for an hour just rea­ding everything trying to soak it in.  It makes me wish my com­mute to work every day was on a train or bus. 

What infor­ma­tion of value could pos­sibly come from all of this rea­ding?  How can one brain pos­sibly con­tain or manage all of this infor­ma­tion?  I don’t.  My brain is full.  It’s overwhel­mingly full. It’s so full it feels like it’s explo­ding some times.  Ok you get the pic­ture.  What I’ve come up with is a sys­tem.  It’s my own per­so­nal infor­ma­tion mana­ge­ment system. 

At the heart of this sys­tem is a great if not the grea­test infor­ma­tion gathering-storing-retrieving sys­tem on the web today.  it’s called Ever­note.  I for­ward emails, I cut and paste links, save pages, quo­tes, ideas, anything and everything.  It rocks.  How much it rocks is another post in a future date. 

So we have the des­ti­na­tion of the data, now how do we find the time to read, fil­ter, and store?  Twit­ter, Goo­gle RSS Rea­der, Face­book, etc.  They all have a way of mar­king something as a favo­rite or sta­rring it.  As I peruse the feeds through the day I star the ones that are of sig­ni­fi­cance one way or the other.   Then each day I review the sta­rred posts, tweets, artic­les, pic­tu­res, and I for­ward the ones I want to hold onto into Ever­note.  Assig­ning tags for their pur­pose and con­tent.  If something beco­mes a TODO I follow up with it at the next chance.

So now you have this gro­wing volume of data in your data store.  How do you find it?  How do you recall what you sto­red?  Easy.  Evernote’s search engine not only searches the text in your notes, it searches the text in your pic­tu­res.  All I worry about now is making sure when I see something I store it.  Tech­no­rati Tags: iPhone, Ever­note, Over­load