Managing Information Flow: How Prioritization Will Improve Your Work and Learning Efficiency
Information rarely organizes itself into something coherent, usable or enriching. It usually goes through a series of filters before it reaches you: for example an algorithm developed to automatically sort data or a writer who took the time to translate the complex into the actionable.
These filters are there to make information relevant, to allow you to utilize data into a different form, perhaps a blog post or a mental footnote to be retrieved when needed. However, sometimes there’s just too much information and too little time.
If you’re a blogger or web worker, you might be subscribing a large amount of blogs in order to find content ideas or acquire knowledge. When you’re plugged into the information stream for many hours a day, it is not uncommon to feel fatigued. The end result of is that you either procrastinate on reading/learning or dive too fast through information to absorb it fully.
I’ve noticed that sometimes I don’t read everything that shows up in my RSS feed reader and even if I do, I don’t peruse the entire article or pause to think more about what the author has written (which is an excellent way to appreciate new ideas). Why? Because there’s just too much information to process and a limited amount of time/attention.
The pressure is always there to make use of whatever content is out there. You need to read fast and use a piece of news to write a blog post. You need to keep up with what’s happening in the industry in order to make yourself competitively attractive as a freelancer/business. How do you make sure that information is consistently useful without tiring yourself out?
We all want as little noise as possible. We want to consume information in a way which enriches our understanding of a topic while allowing us to easily utilize it for our personal or professional life. We want information to be helpful, not a burden on the mind or a chore to plow through. The solution is simple: we need to prioritize.
Learn to Prioritize Information for Efficient Consumption
Image Credit: #1
I opt to receive a large amount of information on a daily basis and have often struggled with managing what I read online everyday. Prioritization is a solution that allows me to transform information from a rapid stream of ideas into something I can process, understand and re-use.
The definition of prioritization is the action of arranging and dealing with things in order of importance. Vital information should be consumed first, while less important content should be processed later. To illustrate what I mean, let’s look at how I organize my RSS feed reader, which will give you a good example of how to regulate the flow of data through prioritization.
In my feed reader there are two key folders, which stand out from the rest of the my feed subscriptions. The first folder is called ‘Breaking News’ and this contains the feeds of blogs, keyword alerts and news services on a range of topic categories. The second folder is called ‘Must Reads’ and these contain feeds of web sites that are non time-sensitive.
This first folder is designed to be a stream of information I check very frequently for news. The feeds here are timely, very active and consistently fast in reporting news on current events. This is a river of data that I dive into and scan every half an hour. I don’t usually read each article in full but scan for relevant content I can use for my blogs or social media sharing.
The ‘Must Read’ folder consists of the feeds that I must read by the end of the day regardless of how much time I have. They are also the ones I read first when I open my feed reader. I deliberately separated specific feeds from the information mass and deem them as necessary data to consume. The feeds in this category are few and they are strictly limited to the ones that are consistently relevant, interesting and useful to me.
This prioritization of content within my feed reader makes what I have to do exceedingly clear. To get a fast recap of what has happened concerning a topic, I only need to do a quick scan of the ‘Breaking News’ folder and nothing else. On the other hand, if I do not have enough time in a day, I can opt to ignore every feed subscription except the ones in the ‘Must Read’ folder.
How Prioritization Can Work for Social Media Data
Image Credit: #25
Let’s take the example of Twitter, a social media service that’s well known for the sheer amount of irrelvant data. Everyone is updating their Twitter stream at the same time and most people are writing about things that you have little or no interest in knowing. If you follow a good amount of users, it will be difficult to extract the signal from the noise.
So what’s the solution? Prioritize information by only monitoring people who are the most essential. These can be the ones who interest you the most, networking targets or people who consistently share the most relevant/interesting/usable links.
The easiest way to do this is to limit the amount of people you follow on Twitter. Alternatively, subscribe to the RSS feed for the important users and place them in a specific folder in your feed reader. This way, you won’t have to reduce the amount of people you track on Twitter and still ensure that you don’t miss any information.
It’s possible to do the same for all social media websites, especially the ones where users produce or influence information flow. Try to isolate the important and most essential data and track it according using RSS or site-specific features.
You can also create a bookmark to a specific page on the social media site, thereby allowing you to bypass other less relevant content. A collection of these bookmarks can be grouped in the same browser bookmark folders and opened simultaneously as well.
Social media content is always going to be noisy, especially if the website you’re using is heavily populated by many users. The prioritization filters that you set up will help you to ensure that you’re getting the the type of information that is most beneficial to you.
Use Technology As Much as Possible to Implement Prioritization
I’m sure some of you are already prioritizing the content that you view everyday. You trust some news sources more than others and regularly visit a handful of blogs which produce articles that you like to read. Mental prioritization of this sort is important but actual changes to how you receive information is equally crucial on a daily basis.
Don’t just prioritize in your head, make sure you use all the tools available to structure how content is served up to you. Do some research on browser addons or other applications you can use to segment and filter raw data. You want to manage information flow as much as possible initially. Once you have a workable system, you’ll only need to tweak it every now and then to ensure that it’s operating at maximum efficiency.
How do you manage your daily information flow? I’m interested to hear what works for you.
Well, I don’t spend most of my time reading other’s blogs. Rather I try to produce my own content, from my own experiments. To deal with information overload, we need to get things done. One thing at a moment. Batch process is a good way of spending our time effectively especially when it comes to emails. Since long time ago I noticed that keeping my email accounts open all the time kills my significant amount of time. So I allocated 1 hour per day to check my emails, preferably at nights. Of course I scan whether there is any urgent email or not. But I don’t interrupt other tasks in order to read my emails.
Interesting read..
I would venture to say that technology simply does not help us in this case..
Can you say,
“Information overload”
I knew you could…
nice fundes on information management ,maki !
I mainly use Google Reader as information source as well as prioritization tool. You can create multiple folders in Google Reader to keep feeds in .. I scan through the not so important feeds and go through individual feeds of stuff which are important for me.
Maki,
That was very helpful. I just said today on twitter that I have almost stopped using my Rss feeder because if someone puts their new post ( like you just did) on twitter, I just click on it and read it and then its just old mail sitting in the rss feed that I have to go clean out like mail sitting on a desk.
More clutter for me to clean. GREAT- NO THANKS! With Twitter- no mess to clean.
But I can see where dividing up like this would be a useful way to use it again.
thanks.
I am fairly new to twitter and there definitely is a ton of noise. When I first joined, I started following about 200 people. I am now down to about 80. People that tweet mundane useless information and never a nugget of gold have been slowly getting weeded out.
The worst are those that tweet junk 95% of the time. This forces me to hear that they are on their “second beer” or “sitting in traffic” just to get an occasional word of wisdom.
Great post. Technology has evolved to the point where you can “set it and forget it” in most cases and have it do a bulk of the work. Great heads up. Still learning how to sort a lot of my stuff as it is. This is a great lead.
Interesting concept for today’s post, well written as always though.
It’s actually interesting the way you describe prioritizing information and using folders such as “Breaking News” or other.
I’ve been doing something similar a lot recently but more in regards to reputation monitoring. When monitoring a client there are certain feeds which are much more likely to highlight results for concern so they are ordered in a way of which one to check first.
Glen
I read new content usually once a day 6pm-7pm on weeknights. It’s too easy to get information overload. Once a month, I update my reader to reflect my interests and remove sites that are very useful.
Twitter is something I’m still working on. I think my favorite right now is stumbleupon. Twitter has a lot of junk floating around.
A very timely post for me…There are so many things to do and so little time…All the various types of social media sites are adding to the time pressure..Prioritizing and having the discipline to work as per priorities are essential…Still working on making the best use of my time.
RSS Feeds + Folders/Labels. That’s all I’m using. I subscibe to feeds which I know are important to me. And just like you said, some are more important then the others and that’s why you make seperate folders. Folders and feeds are the way to go!
It all started with my mailbox where I had to make labels to sort out the important e-mails. This then turned into a habit and I automaticly applied this to RSS feeds.
And a tip for you fellas out there. Use this firefox add-on if you are a rss freak and need to be updates within minutes. http://tiny.cc/G8dGb
I have my go-to RSS feeds in one main folder, but also have them labeled by topic in case I really need to look at something specific. That said, I pretty much have stopped trying to keep up with news/information on a day-to-day basis. Instead, I search for info as I need it. That saves me so much time it’s not even funny, and I don’t get bogged down with a lot of useless news.
If I were still blogging about blogging/making money online, I’d adopt your system, Maki. It makes a lot of sense.
But because I’m no longer doing that, I no longer need to keep up with “breaking news” in the blogosphere, and have very few “must reads.” I do subscribe to several feeds and Google Alerts, but I do my reading of those items during specific times (like Laura). I prioritize my reading based on the topic (I scan the headline to decide whether to read the article/post).
The hard part is limiting my reading to the time I set aside for it, and not getting “sucked in” by topics that are interesting, but not relevant to whatever I’m focusing on at the time.
I’m always feeling overwhelmed by information overload — without even doing the social networking stuff. I keep telling myself I need to get on board with Twitter, MySpace, StumbleUpon and so on and so forth… but I barely have time to scan my favorite blogs. SIGH. So much to do, so little time, so much terrific information!
Wow. Now i know why my time gone very fast. I didn’t make prioriti to information that came to me. Thank’s Maki. Now i will make priority with information came to me. Of Course doshdosh is the first priority for Internet Marketing & Social Media Information.
I haven’t experimented with setting up different RSS Folders based on timeliness of the data, that’s a great idea, thanks.
Huh!
One of the biggest problems I’ve had recently is following what friends have submitted to various social media sites. Of course I want to know what they are submitting, I like what they write and what they think, so it is an easy reach that I’m going to like content that they find. This is one of the reasons I enjoy Twitter; many people will point out something that they’ve submitted, so it’s an easy follow.
It has not occurred to me to grab the RSS feed for the submission page…I’ve been doing it manually [groan], and it has been driving me crazy. Thanks for pointing out the obvious to me (feeling a bit dopey).
I have a question, if you have time and if anyone has an answer, I would love to hear it.
I’m using OMEA JetBrains as my RSS reader. Problem is, when I come across a post that I enjoy and want to comment on, it takes about 8 clicks to get there and do it – which can get painful. It would be so nice to be able to stumble through sites via a browser – much like StumbleUpon – but, only to stumble through to the latest posts (those not read) of sites I specify – let’s say 200 of them. Is there anything out there that I don’t know about?
Thanks Maki for this post; hugely appreciated.
At times, relying too much on information sources can turn out to be a handicap. In any case, most crowded niches have an idea famine of sorts. For fear of regurgiating other’s – or worse – popular ideas, it is better perhaps, to concentrate on one’s own content creation process.
Wow, such a nice post. Thanks for sharing it.
You’re on the money about the importance of time and the scarcity of it. Trying to keep a balance between work, family, reading important and irrelevant things can be a struggle. Another suggestion to your post could be to find filters of information i.e. friends who are specialists in a certain knowledge base and have them tell you in quick format what is up with that specialty.
We are already moving towards recommendation purchasing anyway. We look at reviews more than advertisements and such. We want to know what the community thinks then make buying decisions in that way. Have you read the book “$500 Startup”? It talks about how to build a business based around what you like to do and around how much time you want to spend on it. Once again time is money. It’s a self help/business book that shows you how to start an online business with $500. Could be another interesting source of information for you. The book is offered for free (digital version) along with cool videos and audios. The book’s website is 500DollarStartup.com hope you don’t mind suggestions. Anyway, great blog!!!
Yes your method is worthwhile if we blog. I am using and i always subscibe to the feeds which I found useful to me so as you are saying that we have to make seperate folders for each category is the best. you helped me lot because i was not doing like this.
Thanks Dear Maki
Selena
There are just far too many information sources out there, simple as that. I decided long ago to split my e-mails, Rss… everything and now I only have the main people I correspond with in the space of a day able to get a message in front of me, this being my global network and my clients. My advice is, if you have the luxury of more than 1 pc/laptop then use one for your “mission” and the other as a junk box. Alternatively, create a new “screen name” and start afresh… only have specific e-mail addresses (you should have a few) open in your main account or you will end up with “info overload” and “analysis paralysis”.
Get that sorted today!
Best wishes
Lewis Clayton
Too much is too much. You can only use it, pass it on or throw it out… constant battle to separate what is truly of value and what is …distraction or just takes up space virtual and cerebral. I am running screaming from the screen now… so much in the I might need this category…note to self-” in to empty” ,” in to empty”
As usual, a great post Maki!
Very overloaded just producing art for shows, website, and blogging (which do to circumstances, have not in nearly 2 weeks–I am bad!) . My 5 email accounts are constantly overflowing with “must reads,” “must convo,”, etc. No time to develop all these social networking situations….yet needed to market and sell my art! Is there any secret?
I often wonder , since I tend to get more production time done when I turn away from the computer, if there is any way to keep any business and reduce computer time. It seems as time goes on, more time is needed for the computer, and less time for business.
So confused about the whole mess.
Great post and definitely a timely one for me, right now. Just the sheer volume of information one can attempt to digest online, is insane. These are really great tips, in your usual style.
I’ll be sharing with my readers
Maria Reyes-McDavis
Hi Maki,
You articulated our common pain point. How to make social media information gathering and disseminating productive and relevant is challenging. Perhaps whoever knows how to do it productively stands out to be an effective and profitable brand. Thanks for the sharing. I anticipate that you will write about specific tools utilizing and managing the social media productively in the future.
Although I skim through a lot of material that isn’t useful, I print items that are particularily interesting so I can carefully read them over the weekend when I’m not as busy. Maybe this is a backward step but it allows me to ponder more.
@ Mert Erkal
Batch processing email is a good idea, I do the same twice a day.
@ Wendi
Twitter is great but not all authors are on it and some might not use it to promote their blog so a feed reader is a more orderly way to keep up with all your favorite sites. I recommend using Google Reader if you’re looking for a web-based option.
@ John Lessnau
Yeah, I hear ya. There’s many ways to use Twitter. Some use it for conversation/networking and others use strictly according to its original intention: to answer the question ‘what are you doing right now?’… hence the noise. Limiting the no. of people you follow is definitely a good idea.
@ Glen
I can imagine how one organizes a feed reader to monitor reputation. I have a folder consisting of Technorati and Google blog search results for “Dosh Dosh” and my blog url. Don’t check it often though, perhaps once every two days.
@ MrCooker
Thanks for sharing that add-on… I tried it before but decide to not use it because it didn’t include headline updates and since the feeds I have update at least every 3 minutes, it’s annoying and counter-productive to have that pop-up show up all the time..
@ Jason Peck
I see how not reading news daily can save you a lot of time. I guess that’s one way of doing things but when you run a news blog, you constantly need to keep up with what’s happening in the industry, which means managing tons of information..
@ Bonnie
I know what you mean about being sucked into topics that are interesting but not relevant or useful. Sometimes I end up reading political or culture blogs and suddenly realize that I just wasted a good hour of my time. Well, not exactly ‘wasted’ but I could have read those articles at a later time, perhaps at night when I can afford to relax and take a break before bed.
@ Tomi Yahya, Tim, Nitas, Selena
You’re welcome!
@ Lid
I don’t know of any RSS readers that allow you to stumble through content although I think you can try using Feeddemon (one of the better desktop readers I’ve tried)… and if you load the page within the internal browser, you can comment immediately in 1 click.
@ vimoh
Information sources do not only offer content ideas but they are a gateway towards engaging in discourse over a specific topic. Nobody can talk about something if they don’t all read or monitor the same piece of news.
You can see this happening everyday on meme trackers like Techmeme. No doubt many are echoing each other but I have seen dialog among bloggers develop into some interesting ideas.
IMO, as long as you are pro-active in communicating knowledge, received information will not be hindrance but a benefit.
@ Plush
Finding experts and getting information from them is a great idea. I actually do that everyday on sites like Twitter.
@ Lewis
Thanks for the suggestions.
@ Janice
Information zen is reached when everything is empty. You’re right, if you don’t need the information, don’t monitor or track it. It’ll make your life a lot easier and your brain a lot less noisier. I’ve spent a few months away from the computer and I felt like a completely new person. Extremely refreshing when you are not plugged into the information stream!
@ Urbanwoodswalker
One way of making sure you have time to produce art is to outsource some part of your computer work. Perhaps hire a friend or get someone you can trust to hire sales/admin/online marketing stuff. It’s very hard to scale and grow as a one-man or one-woman operation sometimes. The fatigue you feel from trying to manage it is probably an indication of that.
Basically, take a look at what gives you the greatest returns in terms of sales or personal satisfaction and work on that. You might also need to sacrifice some other small pleasures in life (perhaps a portion of your leisure/hobby time) to ensure that you have time to grow your business and make it profitable.
I can’t offer more advice without knowing your personal situation but I hope this helps!
@ Bright Eyes
Yes, I do plan to write more on web productivity. It’s a topic that is close to my heart since I’m personally struggling and learning how to deal with a lot of time-consuming/attention-demanding tasks.
@ Jennifer
I think that’s a good idea, printing out items that are interesting allow you to digest them away from the web. That’s one reasonable to prioritize information as well.
@ Everyone else
Thanks for your comments!
This is so true. I’m finding it impossible to keep up with everything. Just after I read this I found an interesting video by Chris Pirillo on youtube. He talks a little bit about this. Pretty interesting.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zS3ht3tpRhY&
I think that technology can definitely help prioritze the information overload but, so can a pencil. Sometimes I rethink the tons of information that is coming in and I take a sheet of paper and sketch out my thoughts there before using technology to impliment them.
@ Maki- Yes. Necessary down time. a break, unplugged. Ahh. Which is what I need to do right now. Maybe hear some of that jazz….and sip a little beverage.
The first thing I do with information overload is: meditate.
I love information but hate data. I suppose my mind loves to absorb information because I get a rush out of meaning. But for me, meaning becomes increasingly scarce in the web of infinity. (The next Google lies in solving the Data Abundance versus Meaning Scarcity quandary. Until then I’ll use what biology gave me.)
I use the tools in Google Reader (priority tagging, starring, weekly pruning my feeds). But the best thing is to sometimes just disconnect, find my Zone of Zen, sit and do absolutely nothing. Nada. Zilch.
Great focus comes out of doing nothing. Declutters your mind, destresses your life and brings meaning into focus. Then my cup is empty for new re-flooding.
I use many of the methods and tools mentioned here to manage information and try to save time. I can set my priorities but I find it so hard sticking to them. I get so easily sidetracked. Although I may set aside a time to check emails it is not just a matter of reading, most of them require some sort of action – people have sent me a message/added a link/sent me a shout that sends me off to the social networking sites to write replies or read a post. I invariably head off elsewhere to read more. My other priorities get put aside until the last minute.
I need to be more disciplined and be able to stop myself going off at a tangent or realize what I am doing and get back on track quickly. Any suggestions as how to do this would be very gratefully received.
There is a reason Google is the iconic company of our time. We are in the information age and prioritizing and sorting information is an invaluable service. When you think about the sheer amounts of hard drive space being daily filled up with information, it boggles the mind how much there is going to be in 5, 10, 20 years. Those who can find ways to best sort through and prioritize these massive amounts of information will rise to the top.
On the day you posted this I was lamenting my present RSS feed condition, divided into topical categories.
I put together a BREAKING folder, it tracks all my blogs and their 404 errors, web hosting company outage blog, breaking news feeds important to my blogs, search result page feeds based on certain keyword phrases relevant to my blogs, some deal site feeds, and a couple of important Twitter user feeds.
Then I put together a DAILY folder which has everything that I should check daily. This includes some hype machine feeds for some of my favorite bands, secondary sites that don’t provide breaking information relative to my blogs or content sites, and regular local news/entertainment and local blogs, and some product feeds. Most political stuff I track is also in here.
Then I put together a third folder called READING, which works similar to the GTD Reading Folder. That is stuff I will read if I’m bored at night or sitting in a coffee shop waiting for someone. THese items are not time critical whatsoever. This has stuff as diverse as Telegraph.uk “Weird News”, some Flickr feeds, etc
Anyways, just wanted you to know the system has been working great for me and has cut down my FeedReading time by at least half.
Thanks for the suggestion!
Don M
I agree with you.Management is very important.Great post. Shall keep on reading..
Useful information Maki!
Prioritization is the success mantra in every walk of life and online business is not an exception. To be successful we must know how to prioritize the things we do.
Cheers,
Codrut Turcanu – “Succeeding Against All Odds!”
It’s really a problem because the Internet means a lot more information than there ever was before. Like I read somewhere that if you put the whole Internet in a book, like if you printed it out, it would be bigger than a library. And then the other day Paul Graham wrote about how he couldn’t get any work done because he was always surfing the Internet and before he knew it it was lunch time already, again and again.
So somebody else said you should go on a low information diet, so you have more time to watch television and do the other kinds of stuff in your life that, you know, really matter. I started doing that and it worked really well, and I thought, hell if low information diet is this good, imagine how good a NO INFORMATION DIET would be, so that’s what I’m doing now. And so far it’s working really well. So well in fact, that today I had time to watch Indiana Jones, not just Crystal Skull, but Lost Ark, Temple of Doom, Last Crusade AND Crystal Skull.
Yeah, it’s awesome. If you want to know more just hit me up.
Yeah man, talk about information overload…
prioritization is the key…
How I wish I’ve read this post sooner.
Thanks Maki.. : )
I was spending far too much time on sites like Linked in, Facebook and Myspace. I have stopped using them and freed up about 2-3 hours per week. They were fun, but didn’t help me reach my goals.
I also built some e-mail rules to austomatically file e-mails from certain people and sites. That has also saved me about 30 minutes per day.
Thanks for the post.