On A Lighter Note…

Okay, I’ve been pretty harsh lately so I thought I’d take a break from my rants and share some of the experiences you’ve shared with us on infooverload.com. Here are some tips from your fellow knowledge workers:

Bob: “I have practiced “Getting Things Done” by David Allen and have taken live seminars with the same title. This is 4th generation time management and is the best thing I have ever worked with in this category. Additionally the web site 43folders.com compliments many of these approaches. There is also software for you to use at home call Omni Focus which is also based on GTD. If you want to change your time management life (dramatically), try these options but you have to fully commit for it to work. Good Luck.”

Jai: “I got rid of my TV two years ago, before I moved from Michigan to Oregon. Now we have much better family time together and most of the time goes in family and useful activities. Does this mean we miss on movies or Olympic events? No, not at all. We see movies sparingly on computer by streaming videos online when we need. We also get Olympics coverage on the Internet. And we do avoid all the commercials. Another great thing I did a year ago is to get rid of my cell phone. I do realize the benefits as I am not distracted by others when I am concentrated on important tasks. My pocket is much lighter. And my mind even more light without the load of the cell phone and distractions. So where do we spend the time we gained from avoiding information overload? It goes to self development, creating values, and learning what we want to learn about. We have increased our use of the. I would like to hear from others how they avoid the trap of information overload.”

Kim: “In my goal to reduce files on my PC I try to maintain web links to where the information is. The challenge has been web sites keeping updated with current material, multiple web sites with different versions or having the web site disappear altogether.”

Andrew: “Email filters really help me keep information that’s known to be less useful from invading my main inbox. The only frustration is that creating filters that are effective is not easy because of the diverse types of email I receive.  If there was a way to have a filter system that would learn from where I put emails as I put them into folders, and then begin following my lead automatically, that would be really helpful. Maybe something similar to how the spam bayesian filters work, but instead of filtering spam out, the filters would divide my incoming messages into the proper folders. If a filtering system could also rate relevance of messages, and present messages to me in a date and relevance sorted list (with date and relevance weighted) to present the most pertinent and important messages first, that would help.  Urgent messages from my boss sent this morning would get higher priority than an unread email from a friend two days ago asking if I wanted to go to lunch.”