Filtering out information / eliminating excess

[elliot]

I recall David Allen of GTD mentioning in one of his podcasts that too much information has been a problem throughout the ages, the only real solution is in using the proper filters to ensure we are focusing on what needs the most attention. I have so many books, files, emails, CDs, etc to go through. I have two computers and can't migrate projects to the laptop because I don't have an effective strategy of dealing with it all.

10 years ago I never had these problems. Some of it is from college so it holds nostalgic value but in reality I probably won't benefit that much from saving my notebooks. I'm talking about 90 books altogether and I can't consciously assimilate everything in them. Then over 1.5Terabytes in files I've managed to build up over the years.

On top of that, I have subscriptions to InformationWeek, Money, Time, Newsweek I'd like to gain knowledge from but can't simply because of the volume. What do you think would be the best strategy to go about eliminating the excess so I have greater control over my life?

[Apollia]

I have some rather similar problems. It inspired me to try to write my own custom database software so I can more easily search through my tons of files, web bookmarks, and ideas. So far, I've only finished the web bookmarks organizer.

10 years ago I never had these problems. Some of it is from college so it holds nostalgic value but in reality I probably won't benefit that much from saving my notebooks.

If there's anything valuable in them, using a digital camera to take pictures of the pages with good stuff on them might be worthwhile, if you don't want to keep the physical notebooks, but can't or don't want to take the time to make transcriptions.

If the info is especially valuable and worth the time it would take, then, transcribing it into a text file on a computer might be useful, since that would make the info electronically searchable, copy-and-pasteable, etc.

I have two computers and can't migrate projects to the laptop because I don't have an effective strategy of dealing with it all.

I like USB stick drives. It astounds me that gigabytes of info can fit on something so tiny and cheap. One of those can make pretty much any project easily portable from computer to computer.

I don't have any especially clever tips for keeping projects organized. I just try to keep all the files related to a project in the same folder.

Overall, I'm still drowning in clutter but am gradually digging my way out.

I hope this thread gets more responses, I could use some tips too.

Best wishes,
Apollia

[SimonaRich]

Try to eliminate everything that you do not really need, and keep only things that benefit you. Do you really benefit from wasting your time going through all of these emails and barely reading them? All you get is information-overload.

Also, the more things you need to deal with, the more chaos you introduce in your life. Not sure if you are a spiritual person and know about things as such, but every single thing in your environment takes up some of your psychic energy, and the less things you have, the more energetic you will feel.

You will also feel more positive and stress-free, inspiration will come quicker as well if you manage to eliminate unecessary things from your environment.

You should try to systemise your daily routine tasks and use batching for most of the routine actions. So you can e.g. check your email once in two days, and you will notice that you are doing that much more efficiently and in less time than checking it every 5 hours.

I hope that helps.

Take care,

Simona Rich

[bbdream8]

Originally Posted by elliot

I recall David Allen of GTD mentioning in one of his podcasts that too much information has been a problem throughout the ages, the only real solution is in using the proper filters to ensure we are focusing on what needs the most attention. I have so many books, files, emails, CDs, etc to go through. I have two computers and can't migrate projects to the laptop because I don't have an effective strategy of dealing with it all.

10 years ago I never had these problems. Some of it is from college so it holds nostalgic value but in reality I probably won't benefit that much from saving my notebooks. I'm talking about 90 books altogether and I can't consciously assimilate everything in them. Then over 1.5Terabytes in files I've managed to build up over the years.

On top of that, I have subscriptions to InformationWeek, Money, Time, Newsweek I'd like to gain knowledge from but can't simply because of the volume. What do you think would be the best strategy to go about eliminating the excess so I have greater control over my life?

Hi elliot,

Eliminating information can be a rather painful process. It always seems like we need all the information to survive. But if you try to observe yourself and apply the 80/20 principle in your life. You are only using around 20% of the folders in your computer regularly and the other 80% are are rarely used.

Sometimes it is only necessary to go for information when we need them instead of reading them up to prepare for the future. Because by the time we really need the information, we will need to re-read them again which is a total waste of time.

I had applied the 80/20 principle in my life in regards to my information intake and this had significant effect of helping me to reduce my information intake. Even though I am taking a lot less information today, I find that it is not affecting my quality of life.

One example over here; I used to have 100 over emails per day from my subscriptions to newsletters but I rarely read all of them. Even though I was not reading all of them, I find that I even scanning through 100 over emails per day is a task that is taking up too much of my time. In order to overcome this problem, I unsubscribe from most of my newsletter and till today, I receive around 20 emails a day. Reading emails is not a stressful task anymore.

Do apply the 80/20 principle in your life and you may find that you can eliminate most of the information out of your life without any negative effect on your quality of life.

You can read more on my article on the 80/20 principle.

Cheers
Vincent
Personal Development Blogger

[RT Wolf]

Read 4-Hour Work Week. Ferriss brilliantly tackles this problem. I have really, really benefited from that.

One tip I've got other than what Ferriss writes is throw away anything that isn't the best source of info about something. That is, say you picked up some used books on sale on writing a book, just cause you're curious about it and may someday want to write a book. Well, you can check whether you could get those books again easily (from store, library, etc), and if it's a good source of info on the topic. If it isn't a good source, chuck it. When you get around to actually writing a book, you can just get the best books on the subject.