A Few Tips for Managing Information Overload

Last week I appeared on the Brian Lehrer show talking about my role with Edelman Digital and how I track trends. We cover marketing pollution and tips on how to manage information overload with desktop search, RSS, simplified GTD and the Gmail Personal Nerve Center.

This topic of "Information trapping" is one I plan to write about more. This is becoming the most critical skill that information workers need to survive overload and The Attention Crash. This is especially true for all of us who are addicted to the social web. Enjoy. If you're scanning this in a feed reader, the video is here.

Marketing Guru Steve Rubel Talks with Brian About Info Overload from Brian Lehrer Live on Vimeo.

Comments

[Michael Vu]

Thanks for sharing Steve!

[Kyle M]

I missed this post in my RSS reader and Twitter, but found it in a flood of FriendFeed info and subsequently came here to watch the video (which was great, btw). I'm attributing this little bit of info-trapping to redundancy, since I missed/ignored this post in the usual places, but eventually found it anyway. Of course, redundant info across feeds is itself contributing to the info overload...

[Avinash]

Oh man. I'm not a master at taming info overload, but one good way to not get overwhelmed by your post is to have ten outbound links and an embedded video. Too many places to go.

[CC]

Your link to simplified GTD is broken. You left off the L in lifehack.

Interesting feed!

[John Ramseur]

"RSS is Tivo for the internet."
Perfect! I've been trying to explain this to everyone who asks and haven't yet been this effective.
BTW - I use FeedDemon and works great with search and GTD capabilities.

[jive]

Best thing to do is use Yahoo Pipes, Digg and Google Reader. I use Pipes to filter certain feeds. I dont subscribe to too many blogs, so I try to find sites like Digg, Stylegala, CSS Beauty find out news I want for me and then use Pipes to filter them more. WordPress blogs will output the category in the feeds so it makes it pretty easy. And with Digg you can pick what feeds you want in the first place, and using their API through Pipes you can get the original link to the story sent to you.