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The Devil You Know

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How I manage information overload

In Bidness, Gadgets, Media, PopCult on December 6, 2009

If I’ve had a little extra bliss in recent weeks, it’s because I finally feel like I’ve mastered control of the ridiculous amounts of information I choose to and not to ingest on a daily basis. I Tweeted about it a while back and instantly got numerous responses from folks wanting to know the secret. I said:

16 yr working, 15 yr InterWebs/email, 7 yr smartphone, 5 yr RSS, 3 yr social networks – finally have info mgmt system that works for me.

First, some context. On average, I:

  • Read and react to more than a thousand emails a week
  • Send more than 300 emails a week
  • Subscribe to a couple hundred RSS feeds, for around 400 posts per day
  • Follow 700 Twitter users
  • Manage four Twitter accounts
  • Keep up with 350 Facebook friends
  • Manage a Facebook page
  • Have 15 meetings a week that have to be coordinated with other people
  • Take 20 phone calls per week
  • Have about a dozen topics that I feel like I have to be expert on at all times
  • And run a large local website

And somehow, I finally feel like I have control of it all. I trust my system and nothing seems to slip through the cracks.

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Song of the moment: “Cast Away Dreams”

In Bidness, Music, me, Me, ME! on January 6, 2010
Lindsey Buckingham

Lindsey Buckingham

While working my way through the New Year’s week, I watched a lot of concerts I’d recorded on TV, including Lindsey Buckingham’s HDNET show at Bass Hall a couple of years ago. There was one tune that hadn’t made an impression on me at the time — nor in repeated listenings to the album version. But when I heard Lindsey’s preamble this time it struck a chord.

Without the backstory, you might think the song a downer. But as Lindsey described it, it was about how when you have many dreams, they’re never all going to come to fruition. That’s something to deal with, but nothing to mourn — the burial of those dreams makes room for others. Sometimes you need to put “cast away dreams” to rest in a celebratory fashion, even by dancing upon them.

That’s something I’ve been thinking about lately, especially as I’m contributing to some efforts to provide support and inspiration to entrepreneurs on the rougher side of the adventure. Not every mission is a success — and that’s a good thing to be celebrated.

Let’s dance:

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The measurement mess

In Bidness, Media on January 24, 2010

It keeps getting smaller.

There’s a pissing match today among several InterWebs iconoclasts about Comscore’s traffic counting methods and business models. Actually, to be more accurate, it’s a bunch of bitch-slapping about unrelated issues, but web traffic is the jumping-off point.

You can read it for yourself — be sure to follow the comment thread too, in which all the principals rebut. (Or, as one commenter deems it, “three poodles fighting over a piece of raw meat”).

But for me, the whole thing is sad because it reminds me of another “scandal” almost six years ago now. Several newspaper chains had been caught overstating their circulation. There was all sorts of hand-wringing over it, but in the midst of the mea culpas, I read one simple line in a column by Ed Wasserman that changed my way of thinking and in large part led me to create The Daily You as a major feature of Pegasus News:

“Still, there is an absurdity to the whole scam. Counting copies is a dopey way to gauge impact. The explosion of information channels necessarily means erosion of audience share held by dominant media. There is still nothing that can rivet the attention of a community the way its daily paper does.”

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