Information Overload!!
From February 2010 and September 2011 CTLS Newsletters–
Everyone these days is complaining that there is too much information coming into their lives – phone calls, texts, emails, social networking, snail mail, magazines, radio, television, on and on.
I’ve come across an excellent article on this problem, “Being Wired or being Tired: 10 Ways to Cope with Information Overload”, available online here
This article begins with describing why information overload is so draining. For instance, “University of London researcher Glenn Wilson showed in a 2005 study that people taking an IQ test while being interrupted by emails and phone calls performed an average of 10 points lower that the baseline group without those interruptions. A frightening footnote to this study is that another test group had been tested after smoking marijuana, and they only performed an average of 4 points lower than the baseline group.”
So it is not just you, we are all having difficulty with this issue. The author (Sarah Houghton-Jan) gives 10 very practical suggestions for controlling the information flow. One easy suggestion is to set your email lists to digest. This causes the list to send you only one or two messages a day, rather than 5 or 10.
Here is a short video that will show you how to set the CTLS-L list (http://ctls.net/mailman/listinfo) to digest. BTW, you can currently use Jing for free to do screen captures and small videos such as this one. It is a very cool and easy to use product. For more information on how to use Jing, view this neat little 3 minute video.
You can download Jing here
Get digitally organized
We are librarians, after all. We should be organized by profession, if not by nature. But many people capable of organizing a 50,000 item collection have difficulty organizing their own electronic data. This article has some simple tips:
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/four-simple-and-free-tips-to-organize-your-windows-experience/
Basically, make folders in your e-mail, on your hard drive, on the shared drive. Anything you are not using today and plan to use in the future should be in a folder. If it is something you use often, put a shortcut to it on your desktop…but still put it in a folder. I have not tried the other 3 hints, which involve software, but I did get additional ideas from the comments.