My guidelines for living in an information overloaded world

I hear a lot of negative things about what living in an information overloaded world is doing to us. The amount of digitized data available freely on the web, microblogging sites like twitter and tumblr, text messaging, smartphones and location-based social networking are contributing to decreased attention spans, increased expectations of keeping up-to-date, and the expectation of constant availability. It’s a scary and exciting time.

Can it be overwhelming? Absolutely. I started a new job three months ago which requires current knowledge about a lot diverse subjects, and I’m still climbing up that learning curve: reading new blogs and books, trying to ask the right questions, attending conferences, finding new twitter friends. Some days it feels unmanageable. Sometimes I need a break from the Internet, from taking in anything new, and that’s why I knit and sew and enjoy playing with my cat and swimming and dancing.

But I love it. I love waking up each morning and opening facebook, email, twitter, google reader, and anything else I might be trying out that day, to get flooded by information. And I’ve decided that makes me an infophibian: someone who’s happily adapting to information overload. Thriving in it, even.

I’m a librarian and archivist by training, and I currently work as a web strategist at a Canadian university. I spend most of my day online, organizing information. I have a lot to say about decreased attention spans, multi-tasking, the semantic web, social networking, book hoarding, usability, and information architecture, which is why I started this blog to write about them.

For now I’ll leave you with my guidelines for living in an information overloaded world. They’re informed by my both my professional training and my personal philosophy. A little bit about that: even though it’s my job to be, in the rest of my life I’m not very anal about being perfectly organized. I can be downright sloppy, in fact. I don’t make packing spreadsheets. I don’t have a carefully thought-out filing system for my tax documents and credit card bills. I don’t organize my gmail inbox using tags. And I get by just fine.

My guidelines for living in an information overloaded world:

1. Learn to let go. Don’t feel guilty if you can’t absorb everything. It’s easy to get FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) and feel like you have to read ALL OF THE BLOGS and ALL OF THE TWITTER. But it’s okay to mark everything in your blog reader as read. Really. If you have unread emails in your inbox from last year, go ahead and mark them unread as well. If something is important enough, and you don’t catch it the first time, it will come back to you. The universe is funny like that.

2. Make your own communications count. Make them meaningful. This is not where I tell you not to post what you had for lunch. Some people will love reading what you had for lunch (me included, unless you had seafood). There’s a reason people engage in small talk and its online equivalent. But do consider what you’re putting out into the world, and why you’re doing it.

3. A little bit of management goes a long way. You have to be a bit proactive. Pay attention to how you read and scan. If you find yourself automatically glazing over a certain person’s post every time you see their avatar, it’s time to stop following them and save the mental energy. If you don’t benefit from the flyers that get delivered to your house, post a sign on your mailbox asking not to receive junkmail (people listen to those, right?).

How do you survive, or thrive, in an information overloaded world?