6 Smart Ways of Managing Information Overload

With growing resources of information, such as newspapers, magazines, TV, web etc. it sometimes becomes difficult to manage the large amount of information that we are bombarded with. No matter what profession you are in, you must have faced the seriousness of this issue, though it is tougher for a blogger. You find something interesting you want to blog about, but with so much of information pouring in from different channels the idea gets lost.

So let’s see how we can smartly manage all the information effectively and become more productive.

• Offline Methods

  1. Keep a small pocket diary: Your browser may not support display of this image. Let’s face it. You can’t carry your laptop everywhere. So keep a small diary with you to note down some interesting piece or idea that you accidently found while reading, seeing TV or talking to someone.
  2. Use your cell phone: Your browser may not support display of this image. If keeping a diary does not look cool, use your cell phone. Whenever you come across a good point, save it as a draft message for future reference. While talking to friends, I sometimes get some real good post ideas for my blog at Knowledge Hub, which I save as draft to refer later. Chetan Bhagat revealed in an interview that he uses this technique to get ideas for his novels.
  3. OneNote: If you have MS Office 2007 installed on your system, use OneNote. It is a good tool bundled with MS Office to take down notes in an organized way. It also integrates with IE so that you can send the webpage directly to OneNote.

• Online Methods

  1. Diigo: It’s a bookmarking service that lets you highlight relevant piece from a webpage and then bookmark it so that next time when you open that web page you don’t have to go through the entire page. It also lets you add sticky notes to the webpage, where you can pen down your thoughts. Assigning tags and categorizing pages in lists helps in easy referencing for future.
  2. Dropbox: If you have two different systems, for e.g., one at the office and another for personal use, use Dropbox to sync the data between the two. Thus if you come across some useful information at office, you can save it in your dropbox folder to review it from home.
  3. Read it later: If you come across a web page that you think is interesting, but don’t have time to go through it, then instead of bookmarking it, use this Firefox add-on to read it later. Later after reading, if you find it useful you can bookmark it using Diigo. This way you won’t end up having a big list of unread bookmarked pages. You can also find extension for Chrome and IE on its official site.

These are just few of the ways you can deal with the vast amount of information around you and use it productively. What methods do you use for dealing with the information overload? Share it here so that everyone can benefit from it.