One of the discussions that I attended at Seattle Mind Camp was about how to deal with the information overload that we are suffering these days, emails, blogs, Web sites, more emails, more blogs, you know. Well, I went there thinking that I was going to get to know all this neat tools that will help me be more efficient reading blogs or dealing with email and what I took from there were pretty good low tech advices like the following:
l Forget about complex rules to categorize email and just separate incoming email in two folders, the emails that you are in the To: line (higher priority) and the ones that you are in the CC: line (lower one)
l Do not read your email certain work hours a day and have someone else letting you know whether there is anything urgent that you need to take care during those hours (assuming that person also gets copied on the same important emails that you get)
l Follow the Get Things Done methodology. This actually has a tech component since you can get an Outlook plugin to do so. I already bought the book and once I finished it I will report about it here. The plugin has a cool button that says “Delegate” which is already creating nightmares into one of my direct reports that was with me in that meeting (hello, Jim, are you reading?).
l If you travel and you cannot read your blogs so you get thousand of unread one’s when you are back, just mark all as read and assume that if there was something really cool there someone else will tell you. Do not attempt to catch up reading (I have done that and I can tell you that you can spend the whole weekend doing that).
l Use the phone more often rather than relying just on email for communication.
l And the best one, have an upper bound on how many blogs you read, let’s say 20. If you really want to read a new blog, give up on some other one from your RSS reader list.
mindcamp
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