Limiting: A Simple Coping Strategy for Information Overload

by Seb

We’re pressing on with our exploration of the various strategies for coping with information overload, and we’ve reached one that is particularly close to our hearts: limiting.

While we feel honoured to live in a world where we have instant access to all the information we could ever need, we also feel that from time to time the amount of information we receive is just too much, and that to really benefit from it we need to impose some limits.

“A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” — Herbert A. Simon

We deal particularly with proactive data feeds, which include e-mail newsletters, RSS feeds, or social media feeds, and our concern is that many of these target too broad an audience with information that is too diverse. This means that users need to work harder to find the pieces of information that are relevant to them.

At SpecificFeeds our vision is to counter these broad data feeds with precise, relevant, clean information streams that are … well … specific. This is our way of helping you limit the volume of information you are bombarded with each day and get out the golden nuggets of information into a feed that you will actually benefit from.

Photo Courtesy of http://www.ehow.com/how_6304594_tell-discovered-gold-nuggets.html and Roger at fotalia

Tips for Limiting Information

Of course there are other ways of limiting the volumes of data that you receive daily, and the following tips should also point you in the right direction.

1. Decide what is really relevant to you. Many of us spend a huge amount of time reading, checking, or otherwise processing information that will actually have very little impact on our lives. A simple example is checking the weather report every day, which is a pretty common activity. If you happen to be planning a barbecue or other outdoor event, this could be valuable information, but if you’re going to be sitting in an office for the next five days, is the weather forecast something you really need to check every day? Decide what sources of information are really relevant to you and discard those that aren’t.
2. Let others handle their own information. How often do you waste half an hour reading the attached documents of an e-mail somebody copied you into? If you’re copied on a message, it makes sense to scan it and be aware of the content, but the message needs to be actioned by the person that it is actually addressed to. Let them deal with the content of the e-mail and involve you if it’s necessary. Similarly, if you manage a team, you need to empower your team members to deal with their own information and only pass items on to you that they feel you really need to be aware of.
3. Create a selection criteria. There’s so much information out there that it can be hard to know which pieces or sources to pay attention to and which ones to discard. One solution is to create your own selection criteria. Sample criteria could include:

• Recent sources published after a certain date
• Authoritative sources published by specific institutions
• Opinions from well-regarded individuals with predetermined and relevant credentials

Limiting your information sources to a trustworthy handful will provide only the valuable data that will save you from drowning in a sea of information.

What We Really Want

As we mentioned earlier, one of the key ways we can limit the information we receive is by paying attention to our data feeds. Using a service like SpecificFeeds means you can choose feeds that are highly targeted to a particular niche, and that are actually interesting and relevant to you. You can filter by keywords, or tags, and choose only to receive information from particular authors if you want to. You can decide how often to receive information and how it is delivered to you.

Now is the time to stop wading through that never ending stream of information, and start limiting your sources to those that you know are going to provide the data that you need. Your first step? Take a peek at SpecificFeeds.com.