Waiting on Diamonds to Play with the Rough
August 1, 2008 by Ryan
Image by oscar alexander
How do I prioritize my rocks?
Earlier I posted about the overload I willingly subjected myself to and how confused I was about tackling it. In the few days it’s been since then I have really enjoyed all the interaction and new connections I’ve made now that I, as of this moment, follow 585 people on Twitter and 135 people on Plurk. How does it work trying to talk to 700+ people? It’s actually a lot of fun! I plan on posting soon about some observations, thoughts and insight from this new experience.
My question a few days ago was, “How do I process all this information?” I got some great comments of sympathy and shared exasperation, as well as great tips from very wise sources! Even though I joke a little about my dad, his advice about chunking tasks was echoed in a ZenHabits post here. As I read that today, a couple things stood out to me:
- Find your essentials
- Find your time-wasters
- Do your Biggest Rock first
The fact that I really took the time to read and think about this post came from an adjustment since starting this self inflicted onslaught. I love Leo’s posts! I get so much out of them! I’ve noticed that in my Reader I tend to put off reading my favorite sources and rip through the posts that I’m confident I can scan and be satisfied. That’s completely backwards! I’m only doing it to get that “unread” number down! One of my new friends twittered today that she had 1,000 posts to get through on her reader! And I thought I had a problem! (It’s okay Erin, my wife’s almost as behind!) But realizing I was spending the majority of my time working though information that was lowest value. Imagine if that was money! Actually, now that I think about it, we do that too! How much time do we spend on activities that have the lowest return! I guess that’s the whole 80/20 Pareto Principle!
Now it comes down to implementing these realizations into my information diet. Here’s a few questions I’m asking:
- Is this information intake inline with my goals?
- How much time am I willing to dedicate to this information source?
- How do I value this information’s ROI?
- Am I putting those with the highest value first?
I’m still in process with all of this and may revisit it again, but I’m curious how all my new “friends” are coming along. Do share!
This post is part of my Information Overload Series
- How Do You Process All This Information?!
- Waiting on Diamonds to Play with the Rough
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5 Responses to “Waiting on Diamonds to Play with the Rough”
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I was doing exactly the same thing with my reader, trying to get through all the posts I knew I could just skim quickly - I’d tell myself I was saving the good posts in order to give them my full attention but, of course, often ended up feeling like I didn’t have time so reading them just kept getting put off. But one nice thing about using Thunderbird as my reader is that I created a ’search folder’ that has the new posts from just my favorite feeds and now I read those first. I’ve also tried to get ruthless about which blogs I actually subscribe to, and to be more disciplined about how much time I spend. One thing that I’ve found using Twitter more is that many people tweet about new posts so instead of subscribing to their feeds, I just follow them on Twitter (which is how I ended up at this post! :-)).
My reader has been crazy lately, but I always skim. I’m fairly selective about subscribing to feeds, but with the Love-In and all these new contacts I’m still feeling a bit overwhelmed. I’m working on finding a nice balance.
I still find myself skimming through my posts while saving the “good ones”! So here’s my new strategy: pick a feed, identify the post that I want to read, read them, hit “mark all as read”. I’ve considered making it an official task to eliminate the “filler” posts, so I can leave the quality posts for another time, but by the time I want to focus on those better posts inevitably there are more filler posts! Thanks for sharing your experiences!
Thanks for the reminder on priorities. Right now my priority is getting my little business off the ground without running me or my family crazy, into the loony bin, or into the ground.
I need to just take a deep breath and click “mark all read”. The feeds will still come pouring in!!
Erins last blog post..catch up.
Enjoyed reading your original post and the follow-up. Great picture to drive home the biggest rock idea. I set aside an hour here and there for Social Networking. I wish I could do more!